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 Post subject: Something in my computer hates hard drives
PostPosted: June 29th, 2022, 22:20 
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Joined: June 29th, 2022, 21:45
Posts: 6
Location: France
Dear friends, I hope you can help me with this problem that is driving me crazy... :?
I recently bought some 3.5 hard drives, both internal and external. I connected them to my laptop via USB (as for the internal drives, I put them in docking stations or enclosures from different brands - it doesn't matter, really, cause the problem I'm going to describe is seemingly not affected by the type of device in use). The fact is, when I scan the drives with Victoria HDD or HDDScan, all the drives present very slow sectors: the program indicates the presence of a large amount of blocks caused by orange/red sectors, as if all these new drives, irrespective of the format, brand and whatnot, were old and worn-out. Now, it can't possibly be that I bought several different hdds (from different merchants/stores) and all of them are defective. I suspect that the cause of this problem has something to do with USB connection, even though my laptop's USB ports seem to be in good working order. The drivers maybe? Though I uninstalled them three or four times and nothing changed. The interesting thing is that the disks seem fine (no very slow sectors) whenever I disable USB 3.0 in the BIOS.
Do you have any ideas? And... is my laptop somehow killing the drives?
Thanks for reading!


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 Post subject: Re: Something in my computer hates hard drives
PostPosted: June 30th, 2022, 12:36 
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Joined: December 13th, 2020, 18:47
Posts: 53
Location: recoverland
Buy NEW drives.


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 Post subject: Re: Something in my computer hates hard drives
PostPosted: June 30th, 2022, 13:42 
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Joined: June 29th, 2022, 21:45
Posts: 6
Location: France
rec wrote:
Buy NEW drives.


Do you have spare money to donate to me, rec?


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 Post subject: Re: Something in my computer hates hard drives
PostPosted: June 30th, 2022, 21:38 
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Joined: June 29th, 2022, 21:45
Posts: 6
Location: France
Other contributions? (By the way, I already RMA one of my disks and the problem persists.)


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 Post subject: Re: Something in my computer hates hard drives
PostPosted: July 2nd, 2022, 4:09 
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Joined: December 13th, 2020, 18:47
Posts: 53
Location: recoverland
Who should post an answer to your problems if you do not provide any information that can be used for diagnostics?
Instead of letting dubious programs run for hours with any usable diagnostic result you should have looked at the built-in diagnostic of your drives - taking only seconds to generate.


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 Post subject: Re: Something in my computer hates hard drives
PostPosted: July 3rd, 2022, 0:11 
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Joined: June 29th, 2022, 21:45
Posts: 6
Location: France
Dear rec, thank you for your reply. I do not understand what diagnostic information you're referring to. Can you please elaborate further?
Dubious programs? I thought Victoria and HDDScan were deemed very reliable. They are recommended everywhere.
As for the built-in solutions you mentioned (WD and Seagate own testing tools, I suppose?) they do not scan the entire surface of the disk and report slow sectors. The only other program that does that at a low level is MHDD, but I apparently cannot boot my laptop from whatever DVD or pendrive that I burnt. No way, MHDD won't execute and I don't know why. I feel at sea, really. :|


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 Post subject: Re: Something in my computer hates hard drives
PostPosted: July 3rd, 2022, 6:43 
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Joined: December 13th, 2020, 18:47
Posts: 53
Location: recoverland
Read:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Moni ... Technology

Use

https://www.smartmontools.org/

that can be found on live linux pen drives

to create a log file with the command

smartctl -a /dev/sdX > smartfuji.txt

Replace "X" by the drive letter in question.

Use lsblk to get an overview about the existing disks to know on what device (sda,sdb,sdc...) you should run smartctl.
Post your logfile.


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 Post subject: Re: Something in my computer hates hard drives
PostPosted: July 5th, 2022, 1:58 
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Joined: June 29th, 2022, 21:45
Posts: 6
Location: France
rec wrote:
Read:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Moni ... Technology

Use

https://www.smartmontools.org/

that can be found on live linux pen drives

to create a log file with the command

smartctl -a /dev/sdX > smartfuji.txt

Replace "X" by the drive letter in question.

Use lsblk to get an overview about the existing disks to know on what device (sda,sdb,sdc...) you should run smartctl.
Post your logfile.



Thanks for your reply.
I see. I didn't understand that you were talking about S.M.A.R.T. attributes. Anyway, please find attached one of the logs you requested. Note that I used GSmartControl instead of Smartmontools.


Update. Perhaps I managed to narrow down the list of the possible culprits. I tried to scan one of the drives with HDDScan in Hiren's Boot CD. As I suspected, the results are completely different here: just like when using only USB 2.0 - see my first post - the surface scan reported no blocks.
I also noted that something keeps accessing my drives (when it should be idle) during normal use of Windows, and the drive's led never stops blinking. I wonder if that's the cause of the blocks. Or maybe there's a problem with the USB 3.0 drivers that I cannot fix..


Attachments:
ST16000NM001G-2KK103_ZL2JSLH4_2022-07-05.txt [9.69 KiB]
Downloaded 136 times
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 Post subject: Re: Something in my computer hates hard drives
PostPosted: July 5th, 2022, 15:28 
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Joined: December 13th, 2020, 18:47
Posts: 53
Location: recoverland
None of the values of the typical attributes like "pending sector count" or "reallocated sector count" supports what your bloatware told you.
I have no experience with "Raw_Read_Error_Rate" and "Seek_Error_Rate" on Seagate drives.
Check this drive running linux on a pen so that any influence of a windows operating system will be excluded.
IF you install linux on a USB stick you might install f3 ("fight flash fraud"), create a volume on the drive and let it do a test.
Guessing is not a diagnostic strategy. Excluding is.
See how that drive behaves in your docking station connected to a desktop computer running a different version of your Microsoft operating system.

Don't buy Seagate. They had innovatively replaced the screws in their drive by glue more than twenty years ago until the glue evaporated and laid down on the surface - some people might remember. I don't go with the all time number one of failed drives charts...


Code:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAGS    VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     POSR--   080   066   044    -    89410202
  3 Spin_Up_Time            PO----   090   090   000    -    0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        -O--CK   100   100   020    -    8
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   PO--CK   100   100   010    -    0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         POSR--   100   253   045    -    29123
  9 Power_On_Hours          -O--CK   100   100   000    -    1
10 Spin_Retry_Count        PO--C-   100   100   097    -    0
12 Power_Cycle_Count       -O--CK   100   100   020    -    8
18 Unknown_Attribute       PO-R--   100   100   050    -    0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      -O--CK   100   100   000    -    0
188 Command_Timeout         -O--CK   100   100   000    -    0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel -O---K   066   049   040    -    34 (Min/Max 31/34)
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count -O--CK   100   100   000    -    1
193 Load_Cycle_Count        -O--CK   100   100   000    -    9
194 Temperature_Celsius     -O---K   034   046   000    -    34 (0 25 0 0 0)
197 Current_Pending_Sector  -O--C-   100   100   000    -    0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   ----C-   100   100   000    -    0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    -OSRCK   200   200   000    -    0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   PO---K   100   100   001    -    0
240 Head_Flying_Hours       ------   100   253   000    -    1 (189 38 0)
241 Total_LBAs_Written      ------   100   253   000    -    3027133
242 Total_LBAs_Read         ------   100   253   000    -    86383069
                            ||||||_ K auto-keep
                            |||||__ C event count
                            ||||___ R error rate
                            |||____ S speed/performance
                            ||_____ O updated online
                            |______ P prefailure warning


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 Post subject: Re: Something in my computer hates hard drives
PostPosted: July 6th, 2022, 23:34 
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Joined: June 29th, 2022, 21:45
Posts: 6
Location: France
You're quite brisk when it come to judging things, ain't you? I thought this site's name was hddGURU, not hddCHAD... :D
Kidding aside, thanks for your suggestions, I really appreciate them.
"Bloatware" as the programs I mentioned may be (apparently, anything that I use is dubious or bloatware in your opinion...), I maintain that I was not just "guessing": Windows has a negative impact on the performarce of my drives, or else, for instance, the same program, i.e. HDDScan ,would not give different results when loaded onto a boot disk running a different version of Windows. Something really keeps accessing the drive under Windows causing the blocks. That being said, my drives might still be defective, regardless.
Anyway, I will try to install Linux on a USB disk and run F3, as per your suggestion. That, I can do. I can't replace all my disks with others that do not come from Seagate's factories, although I am aware that many despise Seagate. Yeah, their disks tend to have many problems, but Seagate's support has never let me down, unlike WD's.


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