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MHDD and 3TB 4K drives, LBA wrong?

February 7th, 2014, 8:41

Hello everyone. I use mhdd 4.6 all the time to check my disks for defects. It has served me well over the years. I have successfully tested many many disks of different sizes.

Recently I bought some 3T WD drives with 4K sectors, green (WD30EZRX) and red ones (WD30EFRX). Before using them I tried scanning them, as I always do, with mhdd. The problem is that when I press F4 to scan, End LBA will be 1565565871 instead of the correct 5860533168. If i try to put the correct LBA by hand, it will not accept it. In fact, it will accept up to 4,200,000,000 or something. What is more, when I run config i get "Highest LBA sector number: 1565565871 ".

I tried 3 different modern motherboards, all with the latest BIOS installed: Intel DH61BE, Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L and Asus P5K-VM. I get exactly the same results. Also the size of the disk is correctly recognized in BIOS.

I also tried with a 2T WD green, with 4K sectors as well. No problems there, LBA detected correctly during SCAN/config.

Can anyone please explain to me why this is happening? I read a lot during the last few days, but I just can't understand what may cause this behavior. HDAT2 recognizes the 3T drives and is able to scan them, but i much prefer MHDD (because it is able to tell me average speed and show me the blocks that respond slowly).

Here are some screenshots from mhdd showing the problem: http://imgur.com/a/Jpq2z

Thank you very much in advance :)

Re: MHDD and 3TB 4K drives, LBA wrong?

February 12th, 2014, 14:39

Pretty sure MHDD is not expecting and cant handle drives with greater than 4000 million sectors
and is probably wrapping

NB The sata interface on these drives will be exposing the disk contents as 512byte sectors via 512e

Re: MHDD and 3TB 4K drives, LBA wrong?

February 13th, 2014, 11:22

xsoliman wrote:Pretty sure MHDD is not expecting and cant handle drives with greater than 4000 million sectors
and is probably wrapping

NB The sata interface on these drives will be exposing the disk contents as 512byte sectors via 512e


Thank you for your reply. Same thing happens with Vivard. I will scan those drives with hddscan.

Re: MHDD and 3TB 4K drives, LBA wrong?

February 13th, 2014, 11:39

I've never been able to get MHDD to work with any drive larger than 2TB, likely due to 32bit LBA limitations in the software. That said, I haven't really put any time into trying to make it work either.

Re: MHDD and 3TB 4K drives, LBA wrong?

May 18th, 2014, 9:30

and which alternative to MHDD could we use for HDD>2TB?

Large 3 TB hard drive health check, MHDD alternative

May 18th, 2014, 11:26

int0x13 wrote:which alternative to MHDD could we use for HDD > 2 TB?

Here's a health check for large modern hard drives: http://hddscan.com/
It also supports a lot of USB enclosures and other storage devices as well (USB flash drives, RAID arrays, etc.), without any LBA limitations. I doubt you will find a better one.
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