Hard Disk Monitoring

I have an old PC that I want to repurpose for testing and sanitizing HDD's and SSD's. It's a Gigabyte X58A-UD3R with a LSI 9260-8I (IBM M5015) RAID controller.

Hard Disk Sentinel seems to work fine with SATA drives that are connected to the RAID card but when I connect a single SAS HDD in RAID 0 and run a Short Test, it seems to complete the scan (without the option to close) and it immediately starts a second scan which never completes. It just stays around 50% and when you click the Cancel button, it still shows as running in the background. I have to completely close Hard Disk Sentinel.



I don't know if a second test is actually running or not but it appears to be. Also, it does NOT do this with all SAS drives. Only two out of five that I have tested, so far.

Thanks for your attention.
Yes, I'm afraid this is normal with some SAS drives. I can confirm that of course not a bug/limitation of Hard Disk Sentinel, exactly the opposite: Hard Disk Sentinel attempts the best with this drive too.

Generally SAS drives (compared to SATA ones) implement the internal hardware self test functionality, progress and results completely differently.
The implementation in some SAS drives are very limited/partial only and while they seem support the hardware self tests, they may not provide any kind of progress and in some rare cases the results may be not we can expect.

As you can see, Hard Disk Sentinel can start the test even in this case, but instead of the REAL progress information, the drive always provide FFFF values so we have absolutely no information about how to test runs, how many % completed and when it will end.
Hard Disk Sentinel shows that 50% completed in this case - as we do not know more.
The test can end any time (1 minute or many hours) - so if you wait long enough (or if you completely close / restart Hard Disk Sentinel) then yes, the test may already finish.

Generally this is mentioned in the Help:

https://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/62_testfaq.html

In some cases, these hardware tests (Disk -> Short self test, Disk -> Extended self test) are not available, not supported or they result in an error quickly even in relatively low number of problems. No further information is returned about the result, for example it is not possible to list the sector(s) which are damaged. In such case, an appropriate software testing method is required.

Yes, as you can see, with other SAS drives, we have real progress information, so Hard Disk Sentinel can show things better - as the drive is more cooperative.

If you prefer, I'd suggest to use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option multiple times, as these always help to check if things can be done even better specifically for a such drive and/or configuration.

For example if you may send developer report
1) before starting the test (to have a base)
2) after starting the test and sending the window to background (so generally while the test is running)
3) after longer time and/or after the software re-started (so when the test finished)
then it is possible to examine the situation, compare the results.

This can give additional thoughts if it's possible to improve something specifically for this drive.

Thanks for all of the info.

I ran the short test on a couple of other SAS disks (HUS724030ALS640) and I get the following for both:


I just purchased these disks, used. I bought a few to keep as cold spares and one to replace a failing drive. I wanted to test them before the return period expires.

So I guess I'm seeing a pattern with SAS drives not being able to be tested with HD Sentinel due to disk limitations. So are there other means for testing SAS drives that don't require special equipment or do most people just install them as see what happens? I primarily want to verify that the disk are actually in the condition that the seller claims that they are and that they did not get damaged in shipping.

One other thing that comes to mind is the fact that the drives are connected to a RAID controller. I have to configure the drives as RAID 0 in order for Windows and HD Sentinel to see them. Could this be a factor? I did order a used LSI 9207-8i (IT mode) to use for testing but I haven't received it yet.

No, this seems a completely different situation: in this case, the drive reported the error related to one of its components.
May I ask the current status / health of the drive? Such error usually reported by a drive with problems in its operation.

I'd surely test with other type of tests, eg.
Disk menu -> Surface test -> Read test
Disk menu -> Surface test -> Reinitialize disk surface
just to verify how the drive performs, reveal any possible issue (if there is).

While this seems different, there is some small chance that the same RAID controller can cause troubles eg. improper result when the status/self test information detected, so yes, maybe using a simple SAS HBA (the IT mode controller) can be a good idea, to check/verify if there is anything different.

I'd be more than happy to check the developer-report of this drive too, seems so interesting....

hdsentinel wrote: ↑2023.03.01. 12:17 May I ask the current status / health of the drive? Such error usually reported by a drive with problems in its operation.

I just tested all five of the drives that I bought. They are all the same model and firmware version. I get the same servo/seek error with all of them. All have similar hours of use and all report 100% health. Last night, I went ahead and swapped out the failing HDD in my RAID10 array with one of those disks that reported the servo/seek error. It seems to be working OK. So far, its at 74% rebuild progress in iDrac7:


I will attempt a read test on one of the drives and see how it does. Meanwhile, I sent the admin report.

------------
UPDATE:
------------
The read test past 100% on one of the SAS drives and the rebuild completed on the other one which I used to replace the failing drive in the RAID 10 array. When I receive/install that IT mode controller, I'll test with it and report back.

Thanks for the report, yes, I see that the drive recorded the self test failure, the Information page shows that:

Self test results log #1
--------------------------
Hard Disk Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : Short Self-test (Background)
Self-Test Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : Second Segment of the Test Failed

But if the drive is generally working perfectly, I'd not worry about it too much.

Just a note: according the report:

Power On Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : 1956 days, 3 hours, 9 minutes

which means that the drive reached its designed lifetime. According the experiences, the chances of sudden (unforeseen) failures are higher, so I'd be careful. But it depends on how the drive used: possible overheat, too many start/stop (or load/unload) cycles can cause mechanical wear.

From the report, I checked the values how the drive used (you can verify on the S.M.A.R.T. page):

Specified cycle count over device lifetime = 50000
Accumulated start-stop cycles = 12
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime = 600000
Accumulated load-unload cycles = 1791

so the values are far from the limits, I assume the drive is fine.

So I finally received the HBA controller card. It's a used IBM M5110 cross-flashed to LSI 9207-8i, IT MODE HBA, 6Gb/s PCI-E 3.0 SAS2308.
My PC wouldn't boot when I installed the card so I followed this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBnNaheYmdA) which describes an easy way to cover pins 5B and 6B so that the card will work in just about any computer. It worked!

The HD Sentinel short test works as expected with the same SAS drives connected to the HBA card so now we know