Can Anyone Recommend A Better HDD Dianostic Tool?

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by techtitan, Aug 4, 2014.

  1. techtitan

    techtitan Specialist

    I've decided that it's going to be about another year before I could build a new system. So, in addition to doing some recent maintenance; I decided to check out the state of my hard drives. I have a Western Digital 500GB for my OS and a 1.5TB Seagate for extra storage.

    Both these companies provide scanners to check the drives integrity. Here are the results:

    Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows:
    Both drives passed the SMART Status, Quick Test and Extended Test

    SeaTools for Windows:
    Both drives pass the S.M.A.R.T. Check, Short Drive Self Test and Long Generic Test

    So are these good indications that the drives are still running well and have a bit more life left in them or are there better programs to run? I don't want to keep trudging along while bad sectors eat into my important stuff (most are backed up but still).

    Thanks!
     
  2. Chero

    Chero Private E-2

  3. rustysavage

    rustysavage Sergeant Major

    SeaTools Long Generic test reads every sector on the drive to determine if they are viable. If you passed this test then you can be confident that you do not now have any bad sectors on that drive.

    I can't speak for the Western Digital test results as I've never used their HDD diagnostic software and never read the associated users manual. However, all of the proprietary HDD testing programs that I know about have short and long tests where the latter entails a sector by sector appraisal of the drive being tested.

    I don't think that you have anything to gain by doing more testing with programs that do generic testing rather than tests customized for your particular drives.

    UBCD is a great utility disk but it doesn't contain anything that would benefit you beyond the testing that you've already done on your HDDs. Here's a list of the individual programs contained on that boot CD.

    That said, it's been my experience that HDDs can go bad really quickly, so don't count on getting a lot of lead time prior to eventual disk failure. And definitely don't let the promising test results lull you into becoming lax on your backup routines. If you want to protect yourself against sudden HDD failure, you should be doing disk imaging backups rather than, or in addition to, file backups.
     
  4. techtitan

    techtitan Specialist

    UPDATE, AUGUST 2016:

    I know it's been a while on this post, but some recent developments have motivated me to resurrect it to go some further advice (instead of creating a whole new threat).

    For the last two-three months my system has been crashing pretty regularly. This was due to either the power supply going bad or it over heating, still not sure which. It happened about once a day for about two-three months straight, and every time Windows would give me that prompt about it not being shut down properly and asking if I wanted to reboot in safe mode. I finally got the money together to replace a few parts and this issue is now fixed. However, I'm worried about the lasting damage that may or may not have been done to my hard drives.

    So basically what I need right now is an in-depth, deeply thorough program that can give me an accurate assessment of the health of my hard drives (not just my OS drive but my other two storage drives as well, which currently house tons of important data and media). Can anyone recommend a great program for this beyond what's already been suggested above (IE: has something more dependable come along in the mean time)?

    Thanks for all the info!
     
  5. MaxTurner

    MaxTurner Banned

  6. harmless

    harmless Staff Sergeant

    i'm been a registered user of spinrite for over a decade, but i have had only 2 opportunities to use it for correcting bad sectors on a hard drive. https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
    and just so you know, there is no trial version of spinrite.

    years ago, a friend of my parents called about their computer. it would briefly work, throw up errors, and blue screen. everything was on their computer and, of course, no backup. my parents volunteered me to look at their computer, which was fine, but i made no promises as they handed over their computer. i hooked it all up and ran memtest first thing, and that came back good. so, as i tried to boot into windows, you could hear the hard drive clicking, and i was like... well, that's not good. back then, the only thing i knew to do was to try spinrite, since it claims to "magically" fix corrupted sectors on hard drives. so i booted the computer with spinrite, and set it to scan and fix errors. it zipped through the first quarter of the hard drive, ran into a bad sector, worked on it for 10 minutes or so, declared it good, and moved on. moments later, spinrite ran into the problem bad sector... the hard drive started clicking and clicking and clicking and spinrite was doing its thing and after an hour of the clicking and watching, i walked away and told myself that i will let spinrite run as long as it needs... 2 full days later (and after 2 full days of listening to a clicking hard drive) i got home, looked at the computer, and spinrite said it was done. i was not sure what to think, but i was hopeful. so i booted into windows, and the problems were gone, like they were never there. i don't know what spinrite did, but the family friends were grateful to get back a working computer. and that netted me a bagful of homemade tamales, woohoo, score!

    the second instance where spinrite saved me was with a work computer. every so often, i make images of the handful of computers at work with acronis true image. on one computer, acronis would error out, saying it can not read this one sector, even with the option to skip bad sectors checked. well, that's not good, and i did not want to put a new hard drive in and reinstall everything because that takes a lot of time, and because of this sector error, i did not have an image yet for this particular computer. the computer itself, worked just fine, actually, it worked great, so i ignored this problem for several months. finally, i loaded up spinrite and let it run. it found the bad sector quick enough ( no clicking this time ), and as i was paging through the spinrite screens, the raw data screen was showing all of the language files for windows. that makes sense for the computer to work since foreign language files are never accessed. 4 hours later, it was time to go home and spinrite was still doing its thing, so i left a note on the computer for the boss, stating to just pop out the spinrite cd and reboot the computer so they could use it come monday morning ( i am only there over the weekend ). the following saturday, i talked to the boss, and he said spinrite had finished, so i loaded up acronis and had no problem making an image for that computer.

    anyway, for $90, you can't beat it. i hope this is helpful.
     

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