S.M.A.R.T. Values, diagnostics and howto question

[Maxx]

Hello Guys,

first of all I'd like to say hi to everyone as I've just found this brilliant site today and give thanks to HDDGuru-staff for providing such a great forum. I'm running a PC/Hardware repair shop in germany and recovering data comes with the business "naturally" as you all certainly know. Scratching along the surface of data-recovery for some time now and after the one or other succeded recovery of lightly damaged HDD's and soldering of broken USB-Sticks I have become a Data-recovery-enthusiast and I feel ready to get into the subject deeper.

I'm using r-studio and victoria along with a few others but I mererly use perhaps 10% of the capabilities of each software. This is mainly due to the fact that noone I know of can give me any advice, which leads me to my first question: Is there a detailed howto for victoria? There are buttons and abreviations for things I never heard of, nor can I think of what they might tell me (like DRDY,WRF, Passport, API/PIO, etc.)

When a customer brings in a damaged HDD, the first thing I do is reading out the smart values. Here is the next riddle. Doing a self test with my laptop (hdd fujitsu MHV2120BH PL 120GB) Victory would tell me everything is fine (allthougt a few values are shown as being degraded), yet another tool, in this case crystaldiskinfo, would tell me caution (yellow marker) for values on: pending sector count and uncorrectable sector count but nothing else to worry about. IMO this doesn't make sense. Is there a logical reason for this?

coming back to usb-sticks. Sometimes the controller would be broken but even transferring the nands to identically constructed usb sticks won't work. Why is this? Shouldn't it work, like changing the pcb of a HDD?

So probably this is enough questions for today..thanks for following me so far. I'm looking forward to some interesting hours reading this forum.

//MB

[Vulcan]

Hi, I'll just respond to one of your many questions:

Doing a self test with my laptop (hdd fujitsu MHV2120BH PL 120GB) Victory would tell me everything is fine (allthougt a few values are shown as being degraded), yet another tool, in this case crystaldiskinfo, would tell me caution (yellow marker) for values on: pending sector count and uncorrectable sector count but nothing else to worry about. IMO this doesn't make sense. Is there a logical reason for this?

It would have helped to see the actual values & screenshots, but the underlying reason is that such utilities try to add intelligence into their interpretation of SMART attribute values (including trying to interpret the raw values, to spot early signs of potential problems). However there are few rules for this interpretation - so what you are seeing are different "opinions", based on the different hueristics in each utility, which can be better (or worse) for certain specific situations. See this thread for another example of this:

rec-hdtune-hdsentinel-t22336.html

In your case, another difference might also be the terminology used by the different utilities (one utility saying "degraded" and the other saying "caution").