Good HDD testing utility?

[stlc8tr]

One of my 4TB drives got marked as failed by my RAID card. Not sure why since it seems to be working.

What is a good app to do a full torture test on the drive?

I took a look at DBAN but it's a boot utility so I can't run it in Windows, which I'd rather do so I don't have to tie up my PC.

Thanks!

 

[LTC8K6]

You should use the diagnostic tools offered by the drive manufacturer.

 

[denis280]

you should use the diagnostic tools offered by the drive manufacturer.

yep +1

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

OP, look at the SMART attributes, and also do a sector scan and zero fill.

 

[tweakboy]

HT Tune see if you get red error ,,, etc... GL

 

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hi there.

I agree with @LTC8K6 - the best option is to run a test with the manufacturers tool. For instance, if your drive is a WD you can download and use Data Lifeguard Diagnostics:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=z4ZnSH

Other than that, you can give chkdsk a try too - just click on Start, type CMD, press enter, and in the black window that will appear type chkdsk [write the letter of the drive:] /r.

Let us know how it went.

 

[stlc8tr]

The issue that I have with manufacturer test tools is they are usually too basic and don't provide any information on what is happening under the hood. Though I guess if I can get the test tool to spit out an error, I can send the HDD back for an RMA replacement.

Anyway, the HDD is a 4TB Seagate NAS drive so I ran SeaTools on it. As I feared, SeaTools hung at 99% when doing a "Long Generic" test but it's unclear what the problem is since the application doesn't provide any logging information.

I guess I'll try again.

Thanks for the tips though!

 

[LTC8K6]

I ran the long generic test the other day on a Seagate drive. It stopped at 99%, but it was green and gave a pass result.

 

[RecoveryForce]

You can try testing with MHDD (DOS) or Victoria (Windows).

 

[stlc8tr]

Ended up borrowing a friend's rig to test using DBAN and the DOS version of SeaTools.

No errors found so not sure why the drive was marked failed. Oh well, I guess the drive probably took too long in responding to a request. Will have to check the controller settings to see if I can increase the timeout value.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

 

[CiPHER]

You should use the diagnostic tools offered by the drive manufacturer.

No, you should NOT! The HDD diagnostic utility provided by harddrive manufacturers will try to obscure and obfuscate the problem, which is in their interest to attempt to decrease the number of RMA warranty requests.

Same with the SMART tests - especially the long test which does a full surface read - this also has the potential to correct uBER bad sectors and if successful it will destroy evidence of the bad sector ever having occurred. Because the Current Pending Sector in the SMART attributes will simply be decreased, and Reallocated Sector Count is not increased for uBER bad sectors because the bad sector is not replaced with a reserve sector.

Instead, you should always secure the SMART attributes before trying anything else. This is your evidence. If you do anything else, any read I/O, you will never have the certainty that bad sectors was the culprit. You can still read the SMART data afterwards, but you can only assume - not determine - whether bad sectors was an issue.

I still recommend you read the SMART with CrystalDiskInfo and post it here for analysis. But please, next time, do this before doing anything else!

 

[LTC8K6]

No, you should NOT! The HDD diagnostic utility provided by harddrive manufacturers will try to obscure and obfuscate the problem, which is in their interest to attempt to decrease the number of RMA warranty requests.

Same with the SMART tests - especially the long test which does a full surface read - this also has the potential to correct uBER bad sectors and if successful it will destroy evidence of the bad sector ever having occurred.

If you want to believe that go ahead. :biggrin:

I don't.

If the bad sectors can be remapped and the hard drive can keep on going, with no further bad sectors, then it's fine. The problem is when the bad sectors keep on growing and get to be too much.

AFAIK, hard disks and SSD's come with bad sectors or blocks. These were simply remapped at the factory before shipping. They were simply hidden before shipment.

Data storage is not that reliable. Back up your shit! :biggrin:

 

[LTC8K6]

You can buy new 1TB hard drives for $50.

How much is WD saving by trying to cheat me out of a replacement?

It would cost them more than that to pay a customer service rep to deal with me. :biggrin:

The replacement drive is peanuts to them.

Newegg has 4TB Green drives for $134.00

...

 

[CiPHER]

If you want to believe that go ahead. :biggrin:

I don't.

What exactly do you not believe?

If the bad sectors can be remapped and the hard drive can keep on going, with no further bad sectors, then it's fine. The problem is when the bad sectors keep on growing and get to be too much.

Bad sectors being remapped for reserve sectors means they were physically damaged. This is, however, quite rare.

Due to uBER - if you understand what that means - about 90% of bad sectors are not physically damaged and will NOT be remapped with a reserve sector when overwritten. They will simply be used again, and they are perfectly ok.

Your harddrive manufacturer specifies the relative amount of bad sector generation - bad sectors WITHOUT physical damage - over a large amount of samples. This is called the uncorrectable Bit-Error-Rate or uBER. This is also the reason why current generation filesystems are basically incompatible with harddrives of 1TB and above - the uBER is too high for a filesystem without any protection.

You may ignore this fact at your leisure, but that doesn't make it less true.

 

[LTC8K6]

Just not a conspiracy theory fan, sorry.

HD mfgs are not trying to deliberately cheat us with their diagnostic software.

 

[CiPHER]

Companies have an interest to cut cost and save money. So they use their official tools to minimise the number of warranty claims. That is not a conspiracy theory - it just a company strategy and common sense. It is in their interest to do so. Companies are there to make money, not look after your interests.

For those drives that cannot be recovered using the manufacuter's utility, they will simply zero-write them in the factory, reset the SMART data and return them to another customer who applied for a warranty claim. That is called a 'refurbished' disk. Or in their own words a 'used serviced part'. In other words, you will not get a brand new disk. No, they will send you a comparable disk of another customer that returned a drive that only had a few bad sectors on them.

Again, that is no conspiracy, at least not in my vocabulary. It is simply how businesses operate.

 

[LTC8K6]

Companies also have a strong interest in keeping as many customers happy as they can, and keeping them coming back to buy again.

Warranty claims and freebies are factored in as a cost of doing business, except in the cases where abuse or fraud are going on.

 

[CiPHER]

Well i am not very keen to continue this discussion. But i would like to conclude that in today’s era, there is no competition any more like there used to be. There are only two companies in the league now for mechanical storage if we discount Toshiba, which are WD and Seagate. And in this situation it reverts back to an oligarchy where only a handful of very large companies are in the league.

You can see this happening with harddrives too. Samsung and HGST (Hitachi) got bought out, warranty got reduced from 5 years standard to just 1 year, innovation and R&D was significantly reduced and basically, they are just squeezing money out of existing technology. There is also no future in mechanical storage; after the PMR drives of yesterday we are getting SMR drives now and after that there will be one more round of HAMR-drives and then it is end of story. Solid state storage is the future.

So the two companies left are not all that interested in competing, they are more interested in reducing competition with each other which is in both their interest, to prevent a price war or competition on other fronts such as warranty and innovation. You as customer do not have a choice any longer, it is either A or B. So do not fool yourself with the idea that the 'market' is in your best interest and a healthy competition is promoting the interests of the consumer. If you believe that, i would argue that you have been successfully brainwashed by big companies or others that promote their interests.