S.M.A.R.T. analysis

PrOdiGy1

PrOdiGy1

PrOdiGy1

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20 Oct 2005
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622
Location
Manchester
Just run a S.M.A.R.T. (that is annoying to type!) analysis on my HDD using speedfan and got a number of issues in the report most notably pending (your hard disk has 2989 pending sectors) and uncorrectable sectors (your hard disk has 7040 offline uncorrectable sectors). I do not really know what these mean and whether these values are normal or not for the average HDD so thought I would ask on here.

Just wondering how accurate these are because I have run all of the dell diagnostics on my laptop (as advised by dell support) and they have not found any problems. Is this analysis sufficient enough to get a call out from dell to have a look/replace the drive?
 
A new drive reserves a number of blocks for re-allocating bad sectors in the data area. If a block later becomes unreadable instead of showing up as a 'Bad Block' they are silently re-mapped to these spare ones. However, there are only a limited number of 'spare' blocks and once these are used that's it - you'll get bad blocks showing on the drive when you run chkdsk. SMART is telling you that several of these spare blocks have been used, no error will show until they've all been used.
 
A combination of upbringing and environment? :D

Sometimes it's a manufacturing problem, sometimes it's a physical problem (although old school head crashes are pretty rare now.)
 
Go to the drive manufacturer's site and download their diagnostic tools - run that and it'll tell you whether the drive is on the way out or not. I certainly wouldn't accept bad sectors if it were still under warranty ;)
 
cavemanoc said:
A combination of upbringing and environment? :D

Sometimes it's a manufacturing problem, sometimes it's a physical problem (although old school head crashes are pretty rare now.)
Click to expand...

Moves his HD's into a Hampshire mansion and pays private tution fees Lolz

And manufacturing as in these things have a limited lifespan or some platters just end up being a bit faulty
 
You can also get sectors marked as 'bad' when they're actually OK. To be sure you need the manufacturers utility for that particular drive, zero the drive and scan for recoverable bad sectors. If they are recovered the SMART record will be updated to reflect this.

All sorts of things can cause bad sectors to be recorded - poor PSU causing spikes, program crashes and corrupt files.
 
I could see how power spikes could over charge the EM involved and 'warp' sectors' but I'm curious to know in which way data can do this, anyone know?
 
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I forgot to mention that I did try the samsung utility but for some reason it did not recognise my hard drive (maybe because it is a dell laptop, i don't know?). Any ideas why?
 
I have Speedfan 437 installed. When I go to S.M.A.R.T. the two Seagate SATA drives don't show up. Am I missing something?
 
No not Raid. Might there be something in the BIOS i may need to adjust?

OC Titan Accelerator: Quad 6600, HIS 4850, 4GB Ram, Vista Home Premium (64bit)
 
HD Tune does indeed pick up both disks and the checkbox is ticked to show that the drives are S.M.A.R.T. supported.
 
The chipset incidentally is from an Asus P5Q motherboard. I would have thouth Speedfan would be supporting an established P45 board such as this.
 
So would I, you could try dropping the author an email (or register on the site and do it that way). You can get the SMART info off HD Tune though so probably not worth the effort.
 
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