Hard Disk Monitoring

I have a 5 license pro version and had a couple of (hopefully) quick questions

If I run a test and it identifies bad sectors and remaps them, what happens if I repartition, re-format or change the type (mbr to GPT) of the drive?
will the bad sectors stay hidden?

Will any operation destroy the remapping?

I just used western digital's dlgdiag because I was told that the manufacturers software would always be better than 3rd party software at testing the drive. Is this true?
Even if so, I still love HDsentinel for all the other functions it provides.

Thanks,

jebbrown

Thanks for your message and questions !


> If I run a test and it identifies bad sectors and remaps them, what happens if I repartition,
> re-format or change the type (mbr to GPT) of the drive? will the bad sectors stay hidden?

The bad sectors (if they properly identified and re-mapped) never cause further problems. All further reads and writes are re-directed to spare area, so the original bad area will never be re-used. Even if you re-partition / re-format the drive, the bad sectors will not cause any further problems.

Please click on the "?" button next to text description, it describes the above
and give further information about the current situation.

Also the following pages may help:
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#health
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq_repair_ha ... _drive.php


> Will any operation destroy the remapping?

No, they remain for the rest of the lifetime of the hard disk.

> I just used western digital's dlgdiag because I was told that the manufacturers software would always be better than 3rd
> party software at testing the drive. Is this true?

No
Sorry to say but it is absolutely not true.

The tool released by the manufacturer does not care about hard disk problems and especially they do not care about the stored data on the drives.
The tool you mentioned is designed only to verify if the number of problems reach the error-level threshold set by the manufacturer - and then you may ask for warranty replacement. But they do not care if the data is accessible, if the performance is degraded, if there may be special test methods required to reveal and fix problems. If you check the number and detailed information and options of hard disk tests available in Hard Disk Sentinel, you can see this is much different compared to tools provided by the manufacturer.

I mean that even during simple testing (Disk -> Read test) the software monitors slowly and hardly accessible areas, monitors actual performance, reports any (even minor) degradations of disk status and so.
In most situations, tools offered by manufacturers perform some limited testing and maybe a zero-fill. These are also availble in Hard Disk Sentinel - but as you may see, Hard Disk Sentinel offers much more testing options. For example Disk -> Surface test -> Reinitialise Disk Surface to properly fix weak sectors as described at
http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_cas ... ectors.php


> Even if so, I still love HDsentinel for all the other functions it provides.

Thanks!!

Thanks for the quick response. You answered my questions perfectly, and yes I love that weak sector fixing feature (though I haven't actually used it yet - I have one weak sector right now). I have yet to start to take advantage of all its features as I am in the middle of an ongoing substantial system conversions over the last few months that's taken up most of my computer time - original 6 month old Win 7 Ulitimate HDD installation -> SSD -> dual booted win 7 & 8 -> GPT/UEFI -> (in process) HDD RAID 0 (for data / backup drives only). Since I knew nothing about any of this stuff there was a lot of googling going on

I did forget one question - If a raid 0 array has a bad sector and the software remaps it, will it break the raid, i.e. will I have to rebuild the entire thing?

BTW your policies on the 5 license pro version are great! Allowing me to give a license to my friend 1200 miles away from here not only helps him out, but since he is the resident company faux PC guru, it will expose more people to your product, which will hopefully result in more sales. I love quality smaller companies - a lack of greed and a bit of sincerity go a long way. I bought winpatrol over 10 years ago for a very good price and I still get free upgrades.

Sorry to go so far off topic and thanks again for all your help.

jebbrown

> I did forget one question - If a raid 0 array has a bad sector and the software remaps it, will it break the raid, i.e. will I have to rebuild the entire thing?

This is a very good question - but there is no generic answer for that.
This would depend on the actual configuration, for example (most important) the RAID controller itself.
Simpler RAID controllers (for example integrated and cheaper ones) do not tolerate problems well. They may experience problems and the whole RAID 0 array may break in such situation. In contrast, better RAID controllers (add-on cards) usually tolerate such problems better and may continue working in this situation.

Personally I'd always recommend intensive testing, as described at http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests
of all drives _before_ configuring them into RAID arrays (regardless of the RAID array type). This way we can make sure all possible problems may be revealed and fixed (for example by sector re-allocation) and the surface of each members are perfect. This may ensure that the created RAID array would work correctly. This may be better than detection of the problems when the array is created and full of important data ....


Thanks so much for your kind words

I did a surface test (write) on two SATA II 1 TB WD blacks first, which fixed 1 weak sector.
Otherwise they were perfect, which I was quite happy with since they are about 4 years old
and have been running almost nonstop and the overview estimates > 1000 days left.
I'm not sure what 'power on' explicitly means but it shows ~400 - 500 days. They owe me nothing,
and while they have been tested, I can't realistically rule out the chance of a problem cropping up.

Thus the data has been backed up twice and I will have a backup running daily - this will be a RAID 0 for
testing & data only - My OS's are on a small SSD and an Sata III 1 TB. Unfortunately I only have intel MB raid.
I just wanted to see what kind of performance boost (if any) if I could with this setup.

I wonder if you could somehow implement that trick to fix the 'disk performace not working for any drives'
in your code. It would be a big help for fools like me who read the docs after the fact

Sorry, one last thing.

I just looked at the log, and it read:
Warning: Multiple problems were found in the past days.
2/16/2013 12:34:46 AM,#197 Current Pending Sector Count 1 -> 0
2/12/2013 4:57:05 PM,#197 Current Pending Sector Count 2 -> 1

Originally there was a pending sector flagged and when I ran the write test last night it cleared it.
As of this minute: 197,Current Pending Sector Count,0,200,200,OK (Always passing),000000000000,0,Enabled
My date stamps indicate 'I' was doing no reads / writes to that drive within a half hour of that time other than probably doing the write test.
I'm not sure what 1 - > 0 means - it implys to me the sector was cleared or reallocated, but it does say I had 'multiple problems'. I assumed
the warning from the 12th was taken care of on its own and the warning from last night was actually a notification of the pending sector being
taken care of. I just wanted to make sure because the 'multiple problems' message seems confusing if it was just fixing things.

Other than that, the performance boost I'm getting from the Motherboard RAID only really seems to make much of a difference when I copy / move gigs of data.
I can see by the numbers there is a difference with less data, but i really don't seem to notice it so I think I should probably go back to the much safer non-raid.

Any thoughts?

> I wonder if you could somehow implement that trick to fix the 'disk performace not working for any drives'
> in your code. It would be a big help for fools like me who read the docs after the fact

Constantly cheking the possibilities
There are different methods added to all new versions to adapt to the problems caused by OS, for example by the non-working performance counters.

http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#perf

may help about re-enabling the performance counters (if required). The "Update" section about with "DisablePerfCacheClear" setting (if you scroll down a bit) may help, if you experience that the real time performance monitoring works but after some time (for example after connecting/removing external hard disk, pendrive or similar storage device) it stops working.
This is automatically applied on newer systems and intallations if required to minimise problems.

Sorry for the confusion!

> Warning: Multiple problems were found in the past days.

It means that the LOG of the hard disk drive / SSD contains more than one recent entry.

It seems on your drive previously there were 2 pending (weak) sectors reported and then one of the fixed (at 2/12/2013 4:57:05 PM) and then the other also fixed (at 2/16/2013 12:34:46 AM).

1 -> 0 means that the value was originally 1 (1 pending sector) and it changed to 0, so all problems fixed.

The LOG usually contains degradations, new problems. Depending the frequency of the new entries in the log the "Multiple ..." text is displayed, indicating that the status of the hard disk changed (in most cases: degraded) more than once.
Of course fixing the issues, for example the weak sectors (and thus reducing error-counters) does not really indicate problems, but the log contains this information also, to save when the status improved.

Sorry if the situation caused confusion!


> Other than that, the performance boost I'm getting from the Motherboard RAID only
> really seems to make much of a difference when I copy / move gigs of data.
> I can see by the numbers there is a difference with less data, but i really don't
> seem to notice it so I think I should probably go back to the much safer non-raid.

The performance boost may depend on lots of things: the hard disks itself, RAID 0 stripe size, logical volume allocation size, etc.
You may try different settings, for example format the partition (on the RAID 0) with different allocation unit size. This may cause some "waste" if you store lots of smaller files, but may improve performance.
Personally I agree that RAID 0 is not really safe, so I'd rarely recommend it, unless *really* required and just with constant backup.