Legit Reviews

Not what you want to see on your hard drive:
should look like this:

Is there a difference between the two pictures besides the health status?

yea the unrepairable sector count has a yellow dot and has 5 on the top one and none on the bottom one

Shows how much ware and tear power cycles has on hard drives.

Bad drive: 102 power cycles in 5695 hours
Health drive: 36 power cycles in 6854 hours

At least you have an early warning.

bubba wrote:Shows how much ware and tear power cycles has on hard drives.

Bad drive: 102 power cycles in 5695 hours
Health drive: 36 power cycles in 6854 hours

They came from the same system and were installed on the same day

Good thing they were in a big RAID array.

Wonder why they were powering up and down differently.

I couldn't tell looking at your screen shots, but what program are you using to monitor your HD's? CDI??? I've used HD Health in the past but yours look much more informative.

Sparky wrote:I couldn't tell looking at your screen shots, but what program are you using to monitor your HD's? CDI??? I've used HD Health in the past but yours look much more informative.

Yeah Crystal Disk Info - http://crystalmark.info/software/Crysta ... dex-e.html

Thanks for info and the link. Glad I tried this test. HD Health shows everything fine but as you can see, one of my spares is about to die on me.

Attribute Name: Reallocated Sectors Count
Attribute ID: 05
Description: Count of reallocated sectors. When the hard drive finds a read/write/verification error, it marks this sector as "reallocated" and transfers data to a special reserved area (spare area).
This process is also known as remapping and "reallocated" sectors are called remaps. This is why, on a modern hard disks, you can not see "bad blocks" while testing the surface - all bad blocks are hidden in reallocated sectors. However, the more sectors that are reallocated, the more a sudden decrease (up to 10% and more) can be noticed in the disk read/write speed.

You might be able to 'fix' the sectors with a low-level format.

An exceptional bit of software, which has been around for years and is free; is "MHDD"
You can use this to do the low level format as Apoptosis said but if there are unrecoverable sectors, MHDD can nuke them for you.
You loose a little space (couple of MB in most cases), but gain a HDD that performs like new.

If you feel up to it, you could even tell it to kill all sectors that take longer than say ~3msecs to "flip" (go from 1 to 0). This will turn your hdd into a super fast drive, but you'll loose ~3/4 of space on an older disk.

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

Be careful when using as any sectors marked as dead are dead forever, the changes cannot be undone in the hdd firmware even if the sectors are good!

I'd try out Seatools before anything else - http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/supp ... p-1201.exe

Apoptosis wrote:

Attribute Name: Reallocated Sectors Count
Attribute ID: 05
Description: Count of reallocated sectors. When the hard drive finds a read/write/verification error, it marks this sector as "reallocated" and transfers data to a special reserved area (spare area).
This process is also known as remapping and "reallocated" sectors are called remaps. This is why, on a modern hard disks, you can not see "bad blocks" while testing the surface - all bad blocks are hidden in reallocated sectors. However, the more sectors that are reallocated, the more a sudden decrease (up to 10% and more) can be noticed in the disk read/write speed.

You might be able to 'fix' the sectors with a low-level format.

Thanks for the article, I read a few last night after I ran the test. I'll just toss another one of my spares in, it's not my master, just a back up drive. I've had the Maxtor that's failing for a few years now so I got my monies worth out of it.