ArminLinder wrote:
It may be coincidence, but I have the second WD drive now (1TB), and had another one (2TB) approx 2 years ago which do clearly have a severe defect (large chunks of data sectors unreadable) whilst SMART claims that the drive is perfectly OK, and WD Data Live Diagnostics suspects a "cabeling fault" (3 different computers, 3 different OS, 3 different sets of SATA cables). If I use OEM tools (HDTune Pro) to scan the surface tons of defective sectors appear.
While it's not my primary job to do harddrive diagnostics it happens on a regular basis, and I have had dozens of harddrives on my lab bench during recent years, and no other but the two WD harddrives showed this annoying behaviour.
With all major OSses monitoring SMART to warn users of upcoming defects, I am suspicious whether WD programs SMART in a way that defects go unnoticed until the drive fails completely, probably to minimize warranty returns.
Please comment.
Arion.
It's not really worth discussing (I think) and speaking of cheating without the RAW values. I mean I'd like to see if these files show reallocated or pending sectors. And also, it would be fair if those disks were allowed to run an extended self test. During every day use, bad sectors may not be discovered if they're not used yet. This isn't cheating, the drive simply never ran into them yet. Remember SMART is a reporting system. It can not report faults it hasn't discovered yet.
Other flaw with SMART is that the manufacturer decides when to cry wolf, set the thresholds. It may allow for significant amounts of bad sectors for example. So, without having to look at RAW values constantly, I rely on HD Sentinel to do that. HD Sentinel makes it's own estimation of a drive's condition. You could for example argue, it's not per se the number of bad sectors that are that important (of course it counts), but the rate at which they occur. But same goes for HD Sentinel, the hard disk first has to run into issues before that can be evaluated.
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Joep -
http://www.disktuna.com - video & photo repair & recovery service