Hard Disk Monitoring

I became an owner of rarely used (less than 3 days) Intel SSD of 256Gb which had a serious problem when I bought it and hdsentinel was showing 100/21 its conditions and a lot of bad sectors (360). Main problem was problematic firmware, and when I upgrade it most of problems disappeared. After that hdsentinel 2 times changed health of it and now it is constantly on 70% (100/70). Number of bad sectors dramatically low down from 360 to 30, but these 30 bad sectors are visible only in hdsentinel. CHKDSK is showing that there is 0 bad sectors on that SSD. So, I'm a little confused which number of bad sectors information is correct, HDSentinel (30) or CHKDSK (0)? It is the reason why I put that dilemma in the subject of this report! SMART section of HDSentinel showing all parameters are 0! What is your opinion?

I can confirm that no, there is no bug of course: Hard Disk Sentinel does exactly what it should: reveal and show the problems which may remain unnoticed.

Yes, it is well known that chkdsk *never* displays the bad sectors of hard disk drives / SSDs (even if this is not what we expect).
As described on the website, in the Help and on this forum numerous times, the bad sectors are no longer used: they are reallocated which means that the spare area is used instead of them for all further reads/writes. This is why chkdsk (and generally disk tests) will not display these.
This is the purpose of the spare area: to replace the bad sectors in a way which should be "invisible" to end users and software.

However (especially when the count of bad sectors is high) we can't say the drive is perfect: we'd need to know not only the current amount of bad sectors but a possible change/degradation to prepare (with backup/replacement if required).

If you search for the word "chkdsk" in this forum, you will find several topics about the situation and gives additional information about what to do:
- how to perform a proper test to verify/confirm if all possible bad sectors are already fixed by rellocation (or reveal additional problems)
- and if the status is stable, how to clear the error counters, how to restore the health (even to 100%).

For example, please check:

https://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/viewto ... 10&p=17695

and the links/topics under that.


> SMART section of HDSentinel showing all parameters are 0! What is your opinion?

If 30 (or so) bad sectors reported, then this is surely NOT possible: one or more attributes on the S.M.A.R.T. page shows this (as this is the source of the problems you see in the text description and in the Health %).

If you use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, I can check the actual situation and advise with step-by-step details about what to do.