Does an HD Sentinal test reset SMART parameter values?

[mwmccune]

Thanks for a great program. I have over a dozen large drives used for video editing, which as you know, is very demanding on the drives. So I have used Acronis Drive Monitor until recently and now use HD Sentinal Pro, as it has a full set of diagnostics and tests.

One 3TB Seagate drive flagged SMART parameters and the Acronis event log showed a "degraded" condition. After running your long (5-6 hours) drive test, all is good! No Acronis event log entries: gone.

Are some sectors, perhaps flagged as "pending reallocation," then cleared by HD Sentinal during the testing? That is, are they either actually reallocated or the flag itself reset?

BTW, I find the education you provide to use VERY helpful; info such as the fact that some SMART parameter values are set by the mfg, which might vary from one mfg. to another. Or that the threshold value may be zero, which means it will never be tripped. Very helpful. I must say, though, that the SMART logic which sets a low value to be the threshold value, down to zero, baffles me. Usually a threshold value, of course, is a high number and parameter values increment until they hit their threshold value.

In SMART, it seems to happen in reverse: a parameter value starts high and is decremented until it hits the threshold ( right?) And if the threshold value is set to zero, (which seems to be many if not most of the items in the SMART list of any given drive), then the value cannot go less than zero, so it never crosses the threshold. Why do it this way? Very confusing to me until I understand it better.

Thanks again.
mwmccune

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message and kind words.

Yes, I can confirm that the surface tests of Hard Disk Sentinel (more precisely the Disk -> Surface Test -> Reinitiliase disk status) function forces the drive to examine all possible issues and re-allocate problematic (weak / pending) sectors if required.

After that procedure, you may see one of the following:

- ideal solution: the number of weak sectors decrease and then Hard Disk Sentinel will report no problems in the text description. This means that the sectors are now stable, they can be used without problems - and the drive is repaired in general. The health of the drive increases, maybe to 100% if there are no (further) problems

- the number of bad sectors increase, indicating that the weak sector needs to be reallocated. This also improves the usability of the drive as then the reallocated sectors will never be used any more (the spare area used instead).

There will be a new article with more details and information about this situation at Support -> Knowledgebase -> Hard Disk Cases at www.hdsentinel.com

If you prefer to read more about how S.M.A.R.T. works, what are the main problems with them by design (exactly as you wrote, there are some) and why Hard Disk Sentinel is different, how it checks and reports problems, please check Support -> Knowledgebase -> S.M.A.R.T. function at www.hdsentinel.com
(or directly at http://www.hdsentinel.com/smart/index.php )