I'm currently running a scan with Victoria (4.73b) on a WD Elements external hard drive (WDBUZG0010BBK-03). It's a mechanical drive, but has the USB 3.0 connector directly on the drive board, no intermediate SATA USB board like on some other external drives. So I'm running the scan through USB 2.0 (my PC is an older Dell 755, and only has USB 2, not 3).

Anyway, Victoria reports the SMART data, and it looks ok (see attachment 1), but during the scan (at 6% currently), I'm getting "3.0s" (orange) errors, no red ones yet.

Curiously, the orange errors seem to be occurring at fairly regular intervals. When I was initially checking the interval, maybe 4 times out of 5 it was exactly 716800. As the scan has progressed, the intervals have changed, but are still in the range of 710000 to 730000.

Is this something to do with formatting, or manufacture of the drive surface that I'm seeing an interval like this?

If there were "true" bad blocks, wouldn't it be more random?

The drive is most likely suffering from the WD "slow responding" issue. This means that there is most likely a bad sector somewhere, even if smart does not show it. If you are trying to recover data, I show that someone has successfully fixed the slow issue using HDDSuperTool on this exact model. But that is only a temporary fix to get data, it does not fix the fact that something is wrong with it.

If you are trying to reuse the drive, even if you fix the slow issue, you should never trust this drive again with valuable data. It could suddenly develop severe issues at any time.

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Thanks for the input.

No, I'm not trying to recover data. I picked the drive up at a car-boot sale last weekend for €1, assuming that the drive was dead, and that I might be able to use the case with another 2.5" SATA drive, so I was a bit disappointed to discover the crappy internal drive with USB connector built-on, without a SATA to USB board.

The drive was blank, no visible files or folders, but I ran a file undelete program on it for a few hours, and it found a lot of files, and it seems to be able to recover any file I tested ok.

But anyway, I was running the scan yesterday, and after I posted here, Victoria began finding bad (red) blocks, I think it found about 5 or 6 by the time I halted the scan at about 20%.

Even weirder now is that I'm running a new scan on the drive, on a different PC (Dell GX620 with XP), and it's gotten to nearly 50%, and it's scanning faster (about 34000kb/sec, versus about 24000kb/sec, IIRC, yesterday on the Dell 755, Win7), but there have been no orange, nor red, blocks yet. There was one green block right near the beginning, all the rest are the 3 shades of grey. Same version of Victoria.

I'm not sure what to think of the drive now. I'll post results at the end of the scan.

Are there any other free (or demo) HDD software that are good to test drives with?

If the drive is scanning good now on another PC, then something weird was going on. Whatever was going on, it was happening every 13 seconds and took nearly 2 seconds to process. The big question is, was it a system/program issue, or was it the drive itself that was causing it.

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You might want to try erasing the drive with a low level format.
Just use a tool to write 0 or 1 to every sector.
See if that makes any difference.

Yes, definitely weird. The scan is nearly 65% now, and still no orange blocks.

After this scan, I might try it again on the Dell 755. The only other thing common is the cable, which is a 2 + meter USB 3.0 A-Male to Micro B cable.

The only thing I can say about the cable is that it had been curled up and held with a couple of cable ties, I've them taken off, and straightened the cable as much as I could, but I think I at least had taken the cable ties off before the I seeing the orange blocks yesterday.

Alright, that scan finished. I've attached the smart and scan snaps.

The SMART data is similar to before, though I notice that the status (top right) says "UNKN"; is that because it's connected via USB?

Also, you can see that there were no orange or red blocks found this time, just the one green block, the second block, and the rest greys. This is the scan preformed on the Dell GX260, with WinXP.

The cable is 3 meters long. And in both cases, I was attaching the cable to the front panel USB ports, USB 2.0.

I've now transferred the drive and cable back to the Dell 755, Win7, and have started another scan, and less than 0.5% into the scan, I'm again seeing orange blocks every 13 seconds, for almost two seconds. It started pretty much immediately.

So this is quite confusing!

Any suggestions on what to try next? I have a few other Win7 installations on laptops that I could try, and a Win10 for a GX620. I also have a Linux Mint drive somewhere, are there any good tools on Linux that I could run a scan test with?

I forgot to say...

When I connect the drive up in Win7, in Windows Explorer, the drive shows up like any other inserted drive.

However, when plugged into the WinXP PC, it doesn't show up as a drive in Windows Explorer. I can select it in Victoria fine though. When I go into Disk Management, I see that it is labelled as "GPT Protective Partition".

Would that have something to do with the funny issues I'm seeing?

Windows XP 32-bit doesn't understand GPT partitions.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/windows-and-gpt-faq

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Ok, so the fact that it's a GPT partition isn't why I'm seeing the issue.

I just started a scan on a laptop (Dell D520) with Windows 10 (32-bit), and after about 0.5% of the scan, it has started to find orange blocks, again every 13 seconds, and taking about 2 seconds suck on each block.

Update: After finding 21 orange blocks, I saw that it was finding a block at roughly the same interval, but with a smaller seek time (about 200ms), then back to finding some orange at every 13 seconds for about 2 seconds. And now back to finding a dark grey block (250ms)...and now finding orange again....

So it's very inconsistent, and frustrating. I bet if I bring it back to the WinXP PC, it won't find any orange again. And I haven't been able to find anyone discussing finding similar issues that I'm seeing.

Just getting back to dick's suggestion about doing a low-level format, how might that change things?

I don't know these "new" drives, but your cable seem very too much long, and maybe damaged as you said.
I suggest you trying with another, the most tiny you can, max long 50cm with a big diameter.

Then not all USB ports are very effective sometimes, try plug it at one to the rear.
Also "old" machine or laptop can have less effective USB ports, and the 3m cable will not help...

The drive is surely fine if it have works without orange in one machine. (and the SMART say it is fine)
These orange can be caused by an running process that try access the USB.

Don't worry about the one green that is nothing. (try doing erase pass on it)

But all your 100ms gray can be suspect, but it's surely because of the USB. (or maybe caused by the 2048 block, select 512 instead)

So I suggest you stopping all before your drive "false tilt" bad sector.
Find a new cable, plug to rear, full write the drive (+write LBA num option), and then redone your full read scan.

+1 for the cable being too long. I have had issues with cable length over 1m, shorter is better. Not sure if that is the cause or not.

If you want to rule out the operating system, try using Hiren's Boot CD so you are using an OS that should not have any background processes running. The older version 15.2 includes Victoria. The newer Windows 10 PE version does not have Victoria, but it does have HDDScan which looks similar enough for what you are doing.

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Thanks for the suggestions. I had been running another scan on the WinXP computer, and after about 35%, no orange blocks, but about 25 green blocks (previously I'd just seen one after a full scan).

I was a bit suspicious of the length of the cable, and possible interfering processes because of the almost consistent interval of the orange blocks in particular. Was just waiting for someone to suggest it.

This cable is the only one I have of this type. Maybe I'd less less issues with a proper USB 3.0 hub? I do have a PCIe USB 3.0 card, but while it installed ok, I couldn't see the drive when plugged in on the Win7 computer. I might try it again.

For the moment, I'll try on the Win7 computer again, this time with Hirens, I have it on a USB stick.

Are there any tools that can do a scan run from a floppy? Something like the memtest86 application for RAM?

From my souvenirs, it is a pain to get the USB working under MS-DOS, because of the USB driver you need, sorry I do not remember the driver name...
If you get a working driver, then you can also put HDAT2 in your floppy and scan the drive. (or maybe with MHDD, but from my souvenirs, only with HDAT2 it was possible to access an drive connected to USB)

Anyway forget this floppy scan!

Your drive don't have the right cable, and it is not safe to use it in this condition.
And so you cannot make a reliable scan under this condition!

Hub or not, the road is too long.