HD Health Check

slipd · 17 Dec 2011 at 11:15

Hey guys,

What's the best free app for checking out a hd's general state of health?

I've used hd tune in the past but I'm not a huge fan.

Is there anything else worth looking at?

wonko · 17 Dec 2011 at 11:40

Hi Sam, what don't you like about hdtune out of interest? I find it OK for checking smart data and scanning for bad sectors.
The hdd manufacturers provide diagnostics tools (Data Lifeguard for WD, ES-TOOL for samsung etc.), but the ones I've used tend to give you a black or white 'pass/fail' result.

slipd · 20 Dec 2011 at 18:41

wonko said:
Hi Sam, what don't you like about hdtune out of interest? I find it OK for checking smart data and scanning for bad sectors.
The hdd manufacturers provide diagnostics tools (Data Lifeguard for WD, ES-TOOL for samsung etc.), but the ones I've used tend to give you a black or white 'pass/fail' result.

Sorry for the delay in replying! I personally don't find that hdtune gives you that much information? The picture bellow is from a machine with a samsung drive (sorry its in b&w - its a remote connection) and it shows the drive as faulty but it seems okay and has been running 24/7 for the past couple of year without issue.

I've had other drives too which some utilities say are fine but hdtune says are faulty

Just wondered if there were any other new apps out there?

Cold_And_Miserable · 20 Dec 2011 at 19:16

wonko said:
Hi Sam, what don't you like about hdtune out of interest? I find it OK for checking smart data and scanning for bad sectors.
The hdd manufacturers provide diagnostics tools (Data Lifeguard for WD, ES-TOOL for samsung etc.), but the ones I've used tend to give you a black or white 'pass/fail' result.

My old raptor passes Lifeguard & HDTune but it has frozen the computer, corrupted data and doesn't appear in the BIOS sometimes.

Diagnostics are useless. I fixed the problem by disabling power saving.

Try listening to the hard drive when it spins up.

wonko · 20 Dec 2011 at 19:48

sam.wheale said:
Sorry for the delay in replying! I personally don't find that hdtune gives you that much information? The picture bellow is from a machine with a samsung drive (sorry its in b&w - its a remote connection) and it shows the drive as faulty but it seems okay and has been running 24/7 for the past couple of year without issue.

I've had other drives too which some utilities say are fine but hdtune says are faulty

Just wondered if there were any other new apps out there?

Hi Sam, I might be wrong here, but I think hdtune is simply reporting the status of SMART parameters against the drive's own thresholds. However hdtune may not be interpreting the parameter for the drive correctly (there is no real standard for SMART attributes).

Something looks a bit weird with the power on hours count of 289K hours, unless the drive really has been running continuously since 1978. Either the drive's smart data is trashed somehow or hdtune is reading the parameters wrongly. CrystalDiskInfo might do a better job, or Samsung's ES-TOOL should tell you if the disk really is running on borrowed time.