Hi there,

I've got a Hitachi HTS725050AE630 500GB 2.5" SATA III laptop hard drive and I'm having the most interesting situation with it. The S.M.A.R.T. status shows the following as of just a minute ago (and I'm not 100% positive this image is going to display properly):



Now here's the strange thing: that hex amount for the 04 Reallocated sectors count (0x13909D8) works out to 20,515,288 bad sectors so obviously that's quite alarming, especially for a Hitachi/HGST drive as I've never ever had a Hitachi/HGST drive go bad on me let alone develop even 1 bad sector and I've owned quite a few of these drives over the past decade, I have a 1TB version of the same drive in another laptop, no problems.

I've run the following checks and tests on this drive:

- IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test (the diagnostic from the maker of the drive and what I consider to be the one truly trustworthy diagnostic for it): no bad sectors detected, S.M.A.R.T. status doesn't throw up red flags, disposition code is 0 for both the short and long tests

- MHDD: no bad sectors detected, S.M.A.R.T. status shows the same for the bad sector count, did a full end to end F4 scan with erase write delays and got not one single issue across the entire drive

I've done both the DFT and MHDD scans not once, not twice, but three times in the past two days and again those two diagnostics cannot find a single thing physically or mechanically wrong with the drive but the S.M.A.R.T. status with that 20,515,288 bad sectors somehow is a concern for me.

As stated, I trust Hitachi/HGST drives above all others, they are the one brand/OEM (and yes I know it was originally IBM then the manufacturing turned over to Hitachi and then that became HGST) that has never failed on me as already mentioned so, I'm going to continue using this drive even in spite of that S.M.A.R.T. status. To be honest I don't trust S.M.A.R.T at all - I've got a shoebox full of Western Digital drives from clients where they are mechanically dead but the S.M.A.R.T. status was green/all clear even after they failed as the case was.

Just wondering what other people think about this situation because it's a bit baffling to me. I know technology can and does fail quite often but this is the first time I think I've ever seen S.M.A.R.T. fail so colossally at least in my opinion - it's been at the 20,515,288 bad sector count for a month now and the drive runs basically 24/7 in my Wife's laptop which never shuts off or goes into sleep mode ever and runs sometimes for months before a reboot without issues. Because it runs 24/7 that's one reason I only buy Hitachi/HGST storage media for us, actually.

Odd situation...

Try it with RAW decimal 2-byte display and then check the right-most number.

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Sabo Computer Repairs & Data Recovery

That info shows 20,580,832 in CrystalDiskInfo so slightly different information as of just now (65,544 "more" bad sectors since I made the post, go figure). My guess is that there's just some kind of issue with the S.M.A.R.T. subsystem in general - as stated I've used DFT and MHDD to run 5 full surface scans and there's not one bad sector noted, even C5 shows 0 on all testing so there's nothing waiting to be reallocated either.

I'll keep using the drive since I myself can't find anything actually wrong with it even when using the manufacturer's diagnostic and multiple checks so, it's just one of those things I suppose. It's fairly obvious that if it really did have almost 21 million bad sectors my Wife's laptop would not be working as it does, without any errors, without any lost data, with no data corruption, no issues with any of the software she regularly uses, and no crashes so far even in spite of that rather huge sum of supposedly bad sectors.

Yes Windows is complaining about the problem and warning to back up data but that popup has been silenced since it's meaningless based on the actual testing of the drive.

Thanks for the responses.

(not sure why that picture didn't show up, this is the most current status if it shows up)

Some HDD manufacturers encode their SMART data as multiple bytes or words.

For example, the raw value of the Reallocated Sectors Count appears to consist of two 16-bit words. In the first case the data would suggest that there are 0x0139 Reallocated [physical] Sectors and that the Reallocation Event Count is 0x13B physical sectors and 0x09D8 logical sectors (1 physical sector = 8 logical sectors). In other words, the raw value of the Reallocated Sectors Count appears to consist of a physical Reallocated Sectors Count and a logical Reallocation Event Count.

Reallocated Sectors Count = 0x0139 0x09D8
Reallocation Event Count = 0x13B = 315
0x09D8 / 8 = 0x13B

Reallocated Sectors Count = 20580832 = 0x013A 0x09E0
Reallocation Event Count = 316 = 0x13C
0x09E0 / 8 = 0x13C

Similarly, the Command Timeout attribute appears to consist of 3 words - 0x0046, 0x0095 and 0x001B.

The min/max/current Airflow Temperatures appear to be 0x1E (= 30C), 0x2D (= 45C), and 0x25 (= 37C).

The Power Off Retract Count is 0xCC.

The Reported Uncorrectable Errors appears to be 0x5126, 0x00B7, and 0x074A.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.