I need some honest to goodness HDD guru level opinion on this.

I had some incidents where the Enterprise WD Gold Drive was operating on my tower PC (which is on 24-7) and my dog sometimes runs along and bumps it.

If the SMART data still continues to show perfect condition on this drive, should I not be worried?

How resistant are these Enterprise WD Gold Drives to sudden bump shocks and tilts?

the two 'devices' (pc and dog) are not compatible, so do something about separating them otherwise it is only a question of time that your drive (and data) goes nuts.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Yes - I am deciding to put the entire office room off limits to the dog.

However my concern right now is what has already happened.

Say for example the head of the drive did somehow scratch the platter in one of the previous incidents.

It would cause a lot of bad reads right - which would be picked up by SMART?

SMART can lie; big time - don't use this as your only metric when evaluating drive health. I cannot tell you the amount of times a drive passed SMART and still required data recovery - it occurs all the time (I am speaking about a particular brand here - and it's not WD).

Impact of any nature is not good for a running hard drive. If you are really worried you can "format" the drive (not a quick format) which will cause the hard drive to write data to all sectors and validate if you have bad sectors - which will then reflect / count in the SMART table data.

So in a nutshell if your worried make sure you have a backup. To backup (pun intended) this claim I present you this - you can have a HDD have a parking ramp failure (heads stuck on the disk) because it was dropped - a data recovery lab will use special tools to move the heads back onto the ramp. The hard drive will still report SMART OK (until it encounters surface damage / bad sectors) as a result of the heads touching the platter surface.

If a head slap occurred when the heads were flying over free space, then you would be relying on background scanning to detect the damage. Be warned that Seagate's SeaTools will report that SMART has passed as long as no SMART attribute has fallen below its threshold. This means that a drive may have 20,000 reallocated sectors and still be awarded a passing grade.

I would perform a full surface scan with a tool such as HDDScan or Victoria for Windows.

Be aware that many drives will autopark during idle periods, so it could be that the heads were sitting on the ramp at the time of the impact(s).

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Here’s another update -

I just ran HD Sentinel and it reported the drive at 100% health and 100% performance with a PERFECT analysis…

I guess I should be more assured now?

How long did HD Sentinel take to assess the drive?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I have heard that actually all WD hard disks are internally same ,all use same quality components.
Different families are merely having outward difference in colours and may be firmware. But engineering design & components are all same .That means WD blue and WDgold are not having any great difference . If this is true then this is cheating.
Those experts in WD might be explain whether this is true or false.

WD's "5400 RPM class" models are just 7200 RPM models that have been crippled.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/western-digital-is-trying-to-redefine-the-word-rpm/

This is what WD says:


As I understand it, WD takes one design and then progressively cripples it to create artificial performance classes. Am I wrong?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

From my point of view, the manufacturers have many different parts where they can tune the product, from additional capacitors in enterprise grade devices to prevent data loss which do not get populated on cheaper disks, to tuning the overprovisioning of memory size regarding bad sectors where you are trading memory capacity against product lifetime where the enterprise market gets less capacity for more lifetime, to additional accelleration sensors in mobile devices which detect when the disk falls which are not needed in datacenters, and many other things. Different markets have very different requirements and preferences.