Hi,

Please find attached the results of two hard drives of the same make (Samsung SpinPoint F3, latest firmware).
I've been reading a bit on the forums and it seems like one scan is not so great, and the other is much worse than not so great

My important data is backed up to the cloud (at least daily), and I don't really need great performance off these drives since they store mostly media. Basically I'm willing to stick with them until they die, but if said death is very imminent I'm willing to replace them beforehand (since it would be less of a hassle to move the data while the drive is alive rather than restore it from backup and/or re-download).

Would love to get your opinions here - are these drives dying as we speak, or can I hold on to then for a while longer?
SMART scans are all green, as are the usual surface scans (chkdsk /f /r, Samsung ESTools, Long generic self-test).

Thanks!

PS I can't run Victoria / MHDD / etc. since my BIOS doesn't support IDE mode. My Win10 installation is very clean however and nothing was running during the tests. The drives are very old (not sure how many years, maybe 6+) so I believe the results make sense.

I don't have an answer, but ISTM that the dips sometimes correspond to a single head, while at other times they correspond to two consecutive heads. The number of sectors in the "< 500ms" range seems acceptable to me, but others may disagree.

That said, if they were my drives, I'd be more concerned with reallocated or pending sectors in the SMART report, if any.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Hi fzabkar,

You are truly a one-man forum

My SMART pending and reallocated sector count reads are 0 for both drives.

1. Is there anything I should do about the head dips you mentioned?
2. Shouldn't I be concerned with the high "green sector" counts? I've seen posts claiming these should be around 20-50... (again I'm not overly concerned about performance though, if that's the only thing it affects).

Thanks again!

I really don't know what to advise except to keep backups.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

So I ran a couple more scans on the drives and it looks like you were right! Something must have been going on during my initial scans because things look drastically different now (for the better)