I recently bought a Seagate 8 TB external hard drive. I read about refreshing magnetic media every so often to keep the signal fresh. I've got a program called DiskFresh by Puran Software to do that.

But what if the sync, address mark, and other low-level data become weak? Is there any way to refresh those, or does the drive die when those become weak?

Hope you didn't pay anything for such "tool".

If you're looking to put an extra load on your hard drive, get something like PerfectDisk (unless it became cluttered with unnecessary features these days) and defragment your drive from time to time. This way you can be sure that only existing data is being moved and load/time are spent to at least some purpose.

If you want to test your drive, get e.g. HDDScan and while the drive is new and empty, launch ERASE (deadly to existing data), then READ on it. This way you'll get a detailed health report for your hard drive.

And you won't be able to do anything good with things like servo wedge and so on at home. When damaged, they make the drive go either back to vendor or to a data recovery company.

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• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

DiskFresh is just a free program that reads each sector and writes it to the same spot. That is supposed to refresh a weak signal after a hard drive is powered down and stored on a shelf.

In what you wrote, are you saying there's no way to re-write weak sync and address mark, or other non-user data?

I'm concerned about those getting weak. Do you know if drive controllers ever re-write that?

an 8TB Seagate sound to me like a super fast billy cart.. scary

seriously though it would be quite a while before any signal refreshing is needed, wouldn't it.. years?

Your concern isn't groundless, but that's just one of the possible issues and there's not much you can do about it.

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• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

Ok. Thanks for the information.