HD diagnostic software reliable?

[arc@css]

I had a little erratic drive function a couple of months ago, and for a time I really did think it was on its way out. In the end I concluded that it was most likely an unsatisfactory installation of windows. Everything has been fine since, until today.

Since I don't have a decent video card for gaming at present I thought I'd simply downclock the cpu back to 2.4 from 3.4 (Q6600). After coming out of the bios during a reboot it read 'disk read error', so when after a reboot the same thing happened, I thought something more serious might be on the cards.

I turned off the machine for a few minutes, checked connections, then turned it back on. Once in the bios, this time I upped the clocks to 3.0ghz, thus matching the cpu and memory equally at 1333mhz. I don't know if this is the reason why but everything seems fine right now. All other settings are pretty much at stock, apart from speedstep (turned off) and the PCI frequency is at 101.

Once back in to windows I have just run the WD diagnostic tool and have literally just run the first test to see if there are any obvious errors. None have been found though I don't remember it sounding like that last time when I ran some tests months ago.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what it might be? Am I worrying for nothing? Is diagnostic software usually reliable? I'm not sure what to think atm. Cheers.

 

[coupe69]

Have you run S.M.A.R.T tests on it? I use a bit of software called pc check at work, but obviously this is expensive paid for software.

You could try HDDScan, it's free and enables you to run short, extended and a conveyance S.M.A.R.T test.

 

[arc@css]

Thanks for the reply, coupe69.

I have run a S.M.A.R.T test with Western Digital diagnostic tool, it passed fine. When I first had suspicions a while ago I ran all the available tests that came with the software. Nothing was detected then either.

 

[FoxEye]

A little something about hard drive controllers.

When you do a read from the disk, if the sector is bad you will get a read error, but the drive will not attempt to replace that sector with one of its spares (all drives have spares they can swap out for bad sectors, but they are limited in quantity). The logic behind not swapping them on an unsuccessful read is that you might want to try again to read that sector.

However, on an unsuccessful write operation, the drive will swap out that sector for one of it reserved spare sectors.

Hence a drive which fails read tests can sometimes be "fixed" by writing to the part of the drive that fails to read.

This means that your reinstall of Windows would appear to have been the solution, even if the disk did in fact have bad sectors, assuming the drive had enough spares to replace them.