Asus X550J laptop

"Paul" wrote

| Now, what's wrong with that "theory". Well, on the Seagate
| drives I've got, I've *never* seen Current Pending Sector
| go non-zero. Even when other activity indicates the drive
| is sick, and Current Pending should be growing. Some brand
| of drive, probably is using Current Pending Sector, but
| not in the case of the Seagates I've owned.
|
| Current Pending returns to zero, if an opportunity comes
| along to write the entire drive.
|
| Reallocated Sector Count is a measure of how many spares
| have been used up. It's thresholded, so only after a large
| number of sectors were spared, does the count value go non-zero.
| The result is, the user is unaware exactly how large the
| spared sector count is.

And that's with all drives? All SMART drives? I'm
not clear about the context here. It sounds like
you're saying that with recent vintage drives the
health reports can't be trusted. That isn't really news,
is it? Does that have any connection to the
OS/Windows version?

Mayayana wrote:
"Paul" wrote

| Now, what's wrong with that "theory". Well, on the Seagate
| drives I've got, I've *never* seen Current Pending Sector
| go non-zero. Even when other activity indicates the drive
| is sick, and Current Pending should be growing. Some brand
| of drive, probably is using Current Pending Sector, but
| not in the case of the Seagates I've owned.
|
| Current Pending returns to zero, if an opportunity comes
| along to write the entire drive.
|
| Reallocated Sector Count is a measure of how many spares
| have been used up. It's thresholded, so only after a large
| number of sectors were spared, does the count value go non-zero.
| The result is, the user is unaware exactly how large the
| spared sector count is.

And that's with all drives? All SMART drives? I'm
not clear about the context here. It sounds like
you're saying that with recent vintage drives the
health reports can't be trusted. That isn't really news,
is it? Does that have any connection to the
OS/Windows version?

All IDE/SATA drives now have SMART.

It provides statistics.

The drive tests itself occasionally, though I've never had
a drive wobble enough to fail on a self test and trigger
the BIOS-level warning. The BIOS on quite a few motherboards,
reads SMART at startup, and is supposed to be able to stop the
boot and warn you that the hard drive is sick. You don't absolutely
need to keep HDTune loaded, if you have a BIOS setting to warn
you that a drive is unhealthy. Naturally, the health calculation
leaves something to be desired (see picture below for why that
can be - not everyone agrees on how to interpret that screen).

The behavior of Reallocated Sector Count is necessary because
of human nature.

If the Reallocated statistic reported the actual count, people
buying new hard drives would be ****ed, that the counter is
always non-zero from the factory. The platters always have
tiny defects. And sectors are spared out when the drive leaves
the factory.

The factory has an "acceptance" criterion. Say the acceptance
is 100,000 sectors spared before it leaves the factory. Then
the statistic will read 0 until the actual number of spared
out sectors surpasses 100,000. Then, the "lifetime" percentage
in that field, will drop from 100% life to 0% life, as the
number of reallocations changes from 100,000 to 105,500.

That's what I mean by thresholded. They don't want you cherry
picking drives, and sending them back to Newegg if the statistic
is 2000 from the factory. If it's only 2000, then it leaves
the factory reading zero. If 98,000 more happen while you're
using it, it will finally have a non-zero count. It has a
further capacity of around maybe 5500 or so. In a relatively
short time, you could see the percentage value dropping and
realize "hey, I'd better do something".

This is all supposition on my part, as the manufacturer is not
going to admit to this. It doesn't take too many grain defects
in the platters of a 4TB drive, to create a need to spare out
a sector. And they don't sit there tossing platters into
a huge pile in the corner, because the drive won't read zero.
They allow the drive to have a certain number of reallocations
before it leaves the factory. Drives were leaving the factory
with 100,000 defects in the 9GB drive era.

I've had some drives, that were flaky enough, that they needed
to be "written from end to end" at least one, just to make
their transfer rate performance consistent. All the drives I've
bought in the last four years or so, don't have that behavior.
The only egregious stuff now, is FDB motors making funny sounds
at shutdown (lubrication starvation on the shaft). And the excessive
spindowns that even the expensive drives are doing (that I'm not
able to turn off!). I hate that spindown crap, and that's why I
was buying more expensive drives - not because they last longer,
but because of their "less-compromising" behaviors.

This is an example of the way drives should be built. It has
37000+ hours of power-on life on it. It spins constantly and
*never* spins down or parks the heads. It's always ready when
I search against it. It shows zero for the two indicators I
use for health. I will not get another like this, for as long
as I live. It just keeps going and going. It holds a copy of Win2K,
to give some idea how crusty the content is :-) Keeping it
spinning is a Smithsonian experiment of mine... I'm really
curious how long it can continue like this. And yes, I do occasionally
backup and restore, just to make sure the drive isn't "cheating"
in any way (as a check for latent faults).

https://s1.postimg.org/4l2b9u5eb3/golden_HDD.gif

Paul

"Paul" wrote

| All IDE/SATA drives now have SMART.
|
| It provides statistics.
|

I understand that much. When I researched it in the past
it never seemed to be very useful. The experts seem to
say that the numbers require careful interpretation, and
even then are misleading. So what's the point if it can't
be depended on?

You seem to have looked into the details far more than
I would ever think to. I don't think I've ever actually had
a drive die. And I've repaired many cheap PCs for friends,
with drives 10-12 years old and still going. Typically I'll
replace those and save the old for backup.

Now I have a 3-year-old WD Blue that the diagnostic
software says is kaput. I'm wondering if there's any
validity to Neil's belief that Win8 may have somehow killed
it, and if so, how that might be possible.
I also wonder if it may currently be typical to have
software installed that never stops accessing the disk.

In other words, my concern is not with the efficiency
of SMART in predicting a dying drive. I wouldn't want
to depend on that anyway. I'm just wondering whether
there may be special considerations with the "Metro
Series" of Windows.

Three years is the typical low-end prediction of
a drive's life, but I've never actually seen one die
so soon.

Mayayana wrote:
"Paul" wrote

| All IDE/SATA drives now have SMART.
|
| It provides statistics.
|

I understand that much. When I researched it in the past
it never seemed to be very useful. The experts seem to
say that the numbers require careful interpretation, and
even then are misleading. So what's the point if it can't
be depended on?

You seem to have looked into the details far more than
I would ever think to. I don't think I've ever actually had
a drive die. And I've repaired many cheap PCs for friends,
with drives 10-12 years old and still going. Typically I'll
replace those and save the old for backup.

Now I have a 3-year-old WD Blue that the diagnostic
software says is kaput. I'm wondering if there's any
validity to Neil's belief that Win8 may have somehow killed
it, and if so, how that might be possible.
I also wonder if it may currently be typical to have
software installed that never stops accessing the disk.

In other words, my concern is not with the efficiency
of SMART in predicting a dying drive. I wouldn't want
to depend on that anyway. I'm just wondering whether
there may be special considerations with the "Metro
Series" of Windows.

Three years is the typical low-end prediction of
a drive's life, but I've never actually seen one die
so soon.

If you apply a pathological load to a regular
hard drive, it lasts around 1 year. This is a number
reported by people running web servers, where the disk
never stops moving the heads.

For example, if you wanted to try that at home, you might
store a million test files on the disk, such that they
span the entire surface, then use your random number
generator and ask the disk to read files at random.
That will throw the head around from inner to outer
ring. It flexes and un-flexes the actuator cable. And
wears the bearing the actuator rests on. That bearing
is not "frictionless" like the bearing inside the FDB
(fluid dynamic bearing) motor.

The flex cable is actually specifically designed for
each drive. On drives that short-stroke (such as perhaps
a 15K drive providing 300MB/sec transfer rates), the cable
will have different design requirements than your 7200RPM
drive where the arm moves the full distance over the
surface. You can't even interchange internal flex cables
between drives, because they're optimized for how the
drive works. Maybe the mass of the actuator arm, is
part of the equations.

Now, what is the drive in your laptop doing ? Well, it
doesn't have the pathological condition applied to it.
On drives that spin down, you might even notice on
occasion, that the heads park. And that's an indicator
that there isn't constant access. The drive is rated
for 300,000 head parks.

I have had a constant access situation. The optimizer
that moves prefetch files around or something, got
"stuck" one day, and using ProcMon, I could see constant
read and write to the same sector (basically rewriting
the sector with its current contents) over and over again,
at max speed. I could hear a high pitched "singing" sound,
even though the heads don't need to be moved around
when doing that. Just doing a little bit of regular
defrag, caused the prefetch optimizer to stop doing that :-)
Now, that's custom code in WinXP era, and entirely
different ("written from scratch") code is used in
Windows 8.

There is unlikely to be that kind of activity on
Windows 8, but between perfmon.msc and ProcMon.exe
(Sysinternals) you could probably figure it out.

And always remember, that the instrumentation on the OS
is incomplete. The OS is not fully transparent when it
comes to logging hardware activity. Many times, I'll
instrument a situation, and a graph will read zero,
when I know for a fact, there is activity. Like just
yesterday, I couldn't see some pagefile activity...

Paul

On 10/28/2017 9:10 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Neil" wrote
| I'm referring to something that happened to me over two years ago, so I
| think it's best for you to do a search

I did do a search, of course. If I'd turned up anything
relevant I wouldn't be asking.
Saying that Win8 ruins
hard disks is a dramatic statement. There's no reason
to either doubt or believe what you say on only your
say-so. Naturally I went looking. I've been unable to
find even one report of a fishy early disk death.


There is a *lot* of information on-line about the issues related to
SMART drive failures. I don't know why you aren't finding any that help
you to understand some of the possible reasons for your experience.

But, let me be clear about a few things:
These problems are not generalized to the point where one could say
something like "...Win8 ruins discs...", and I did not state anything
remotely like that. There are many functional variables that were
introduced with the Win8 OS, and those familiar with it understand this
such that I doubt they would arrive at your conclusion.

In my particular case, which resulted in some similarities with your
experience, I was able to track the problem to Win8.1 disregarding
CHKDSK /f and continuing to write into the same bad sectors until the
boot sector was trashed. There are many possible reasons for that, so IT
DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOUR EXPERIENCE IS DUE TO THE SAME ISSUE, which is
why I didn't suggest that it was at any point.

If what
you say is true I'd expect to see all sorts of complaints
and articles about the disaster of Win8.

If you even remotely understood what I wrote, you would know that I do
not consider Win8 to be a disaster. Finding articles that feeds your
misconceptions is not my responsibility.

--
best regards,

Neil

I have windows 8.1 on my hp lap top and i like it alot have had no problems
so far with it.
I love windows 7 as well windows 10 was on the lap top from it's old owner
when i got it tried it for a week removed and and did a factory restore to
windows 8.1 that it came with did all the updates and patches and all is
well


--
AL'S COMPUTERS
"Neil" wrote in message
news
On 10/28/2017 9:10 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Neil" wrote
| I'm referring to something that happened to me over two years ago, so I
| think it's best for you to do a search

I did do a search, of course. If I'd turned up anything
relevant I wouldn't be asking.
Saying that Win8 ruins
hard disks is a dramatic statement. There's no reason
to either doubt or believe what you say on only your
say-so. Naturally I went looking. I've been unable to
find even one report of a fishy early disk death.


There is a *lot* of information on-line about the issues related to SMART
drive failures. I don't know why you aren't finding any that help you to
understand some of the possible reasons for your experience.

But, let me be clear about a few things:
These problems are not generalized to the point where one could say
something like "...Win8 ruins discs...", and I did not state anything
remotely like that. There are many functional variables that were
introduced with the Win8 OS, and those familiar with it understand this
such that I doubt they would arrive at your conclusion.

In my particular case, which resulted in some similarities with your
experience, I was able to track the problem to Win8.1 disregarding CHKDSK
/f and continuing to write into the same bad sectors until the boot sector
was trashed. There are many possible reasons for that, so IT DOES NOT MEAN
THAT YOUR EXPERIENCE IS DUE TO THE SAME ISSUE, which is why I didn't
suggest that it was at any point.

If what
you say is true I'd expect to see all sorts of complaints
and articles about the disaster of Win8.

If you even remotely understood what I wrote, you would know that I do not
consider Win8 to be a disaster. Finding articles that feeds your
misconceptions is not my responsibility.

--
best regards,

Neil

On 10/26/2017 09:34 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"philo" wrote

| Also a good idea to go the the website of the HD's mfg ...get and run
| their diagnostic. If /any/ errors are found, replace the drive
| Might as well run a RAM test too

I was able to test RAM. That checked out. I ended
up installing it into a Win7 box and running Hiren's
boot disk. The WD diagnostic came out with error 7
and quit. BootIt sees all the partitions, but the data
on them seems to be limited. Chckdsk retrieved all sorts
of things on the Windows partition but couldn't access
any of the others.
At this point I'm thinking there must be a problem
with the hard disk.





Yes, indeed it does sound like a HD issue

"philo" wrote

| I was able to test RAM. That checked out. I ended
| up installing it into a Win7 box and running Hiren's
| boot disk. The WD diagnostic came out with error 7
| and quit. BootIt sees all the partitions, but the data
| on them seems to be limited. Chckdsk retrieved all sorts
| of things on the Windows partition but couldn't access
| any of the others.
| At this point I'm thinking there must be a problem
| with the hard disk.
|
| Yes, indeed it does sound like a HD issue

On 2 separate runs from a boot disk the WD utility
came up with error 7 and then while doing a "media
scan", in preparation for a thorough check, it stopped
with error 225. Their error page says that means,
"Too many errors to continue" and advises getting
a new disk.

Meanwhile various tools said that it passed a
SMART scan.

This whole thing has got me to check out SMART for
perhaps the third time, and I've come away with the
same impressions I've had in the past: It seems to be
of little value and I've yet to find a clear explanation
of how to interpret it. People recommend a Wikipedia
page, but that's not very helpful. Even the categories
reported vary between tools.

" the research showed that a large proportion (56%)
of the failed drives failed without recording any count
in the "four strong S.M.A.R.T. warnings" identified as
scan errors"
"36% of drives failed without recording any S.M.A.R.T.
error at all, except the temperature, meaning that
S.M.A.R.T. data alone was of limited usefulness in
anticipating failures."

I'm still very curious about how the disk could die in
3 years, but statistically that's not unheard of. And
I don't know how it was used. I guess the only thing
I can do is to reinstall and try to minimize unnecessary
background junk when I do the setup. That's the one
aspect that's got me suspicious. When I search for
links about hard disk trouble I seem to find a lot of
complaints from people about ceaseless activity, which
they eventually trace to some unnecessary 3rd-party
applet.

On 10/31/2017 08:41 AM, Mayayana wrote:


" the research showed that a large proportion (56%)
of the failed drives failed without recording any count
in the "four strong S.M.A.R.T. warnings" identified as
scan errors"
"36% of drives failed without recording any S.M.A.R.T.
error at all, except the temperature, meaning that
S.M.A.R.T. data alone was of limited usefulness in
anticipating failures."

I'm still very curious about how the disk could die in
3 years, but statistically that's not unheard of. And
I don't know how it was used. I guess the only thing
I can do is to reinstall and try to minimize unnecessary
background junk when I do the setup. That's the one
aspect that's got me suspicious. When I search for
links about hard disk trouble I seem to find a lot of
complaints from people about ceaseless activity, which
they eventually trace to some unnecessary 3rd-party
applet.





I have seen a drive die in six weeks and I have some drives here in my
junkbox that are 20 years old and still good

Mayayana wrote:
"philo" wrote

| I was able to test RAM. That checked out. I ended
| up installing it into a Win7 box and running Hiren's
| boot disk. The WD diagnostic came out with error 7
| and quit. BootIt sees all the partitions, but the data
| on them seems to be limited. Chckdsk retrieved all sorts
| of things on the Windows partition but couldn't access
| any of the others.
| At this point I'm thinking there must be a problem
| with the hard disk.
|
| Yes, indeed it does sound like a HD issue

On 2 separate runs from a boot disk the WD utility
came up with error 7 and then while doing a "media
scan", in preparation for a thorough check, it stopped
with error 225. Their error page says that means,
"Too many errors to continue" and advises getting
a new disk.

Meanwhile various tools said that it passed a
SMART scan.

This whole thing has got me to check out SMART for
perhaps the third time, and I've come away with the
same impressions I've had in the past: It seems to be
of little value and I've yet to find a clear explanation
of how to interpret it. People recommend a Wikipedia
page, but that's not very helpful. Even the categories
reported vary between tools.

" the research showed that a large proportion (56%)
of the failed drives failed without recording any count
in the "four strong S.M.A.R.T. warnings" identified as
scan errors"
"36% of drives failed without recording any S.M.A.R.T.
error at all, except the temperature, meaning that
S.M.A.R.T. data alone was of limited usefulness in
anticipating failures."

I'm still very curious about how the disk could die in
3 years, but statistically that's not unheard of. And
I don't know how it was used. I guess the only thing
I can do is to reinstall and try to minimize unnecessary
background junk when I do the setup. That's the one
aspect that's got me suspicious. When I search for
links about hard disk trouble I seem to find a lot of
complaints from people about ceaseless activity, which
they eventually trace to some unnecessary 3rd-party
applet.

The "reallocated" metric works best for error patterns
spread uniformly over the disk surface.

However, that's not the only failure pattern. I had
a disk here, with an obvious "slow patch" which means
read errors and re-allocated galore. And the thresholded
reallocated data field still said "zero", implying 100%
health. If I had been using automated surveillance,
it would have missed the warning signs. However, all
the OS files were slow to load, so a human could sure
tell something was wrong. (That was for a 60GB OS
partition, slow as molasses, on a 500GB drive with
440GB of "good" sectors. An HDTune benchmark showed
the problem for what it was. A wide bad spot.)

I use SMART, in combination with common sense. If
I see, hear, or smell trouble, I get out the SMART
panel and have a look, for confirmation. I won't
always get an "indicator" from SMART, but it's better
than nothing. And if something is registering,
I can take note of the degradation rate. The
growth rate of the reallocated, on a day-by-day
basis. That tells me how much trouble I'm in,
and how fast I should run to the store for
a spare drive.

SSDs are slightly different, and because of the evil
end-of-life policy of some brands, maintenance
should be taken more seriously. (An SSD drive can simply
stop responding to your queries, read or write,
as a "service" to you!) A HDD won't do that.
When you buy an SSD, *always* check the web for
info on end-of-life behavior.

Paul