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beta scanner says smart errors wd utility says ok


AMCross

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Is this "Pending recount errors", or is this actually "Pending Sector Count"?
 
If this is the "pending sector count", then it may indicate an issue with the drive. Let me (be lazy and) quote from Wikipedia about this value:

Count of "unstable" sectors (waiting to be remapped, because of unrecoverable read errors). If an unstable sector is subsequently read successfully, the sector is remapped and this value is decreased. Read errors on a sector will not remap the sector immediately (since the correct value cannot be read and so the value to remap is not known, and also it might become readable later); instead, the drive firmware remembers that the sector needs to be remapped, and will remap it the next time it's written.[35] However some drives will not immediately remap such sectors when written; instead the drive will first attempt to write to the problem sector and if the write operation is successful then the sector will be marked good (in this case, the "Reallocation Event Count" (0xC4) will not be increased). This is a serious shortcoming, for if such a drive contains marginal sectors that consistently fail only after some time has passed following a successful write operation, then the drive will never remap these problem sectors.

If you force a surface scan of the disk, I would not be surprised if you start seeing damaged sectors on the disk, as that is what the SMART error usually indicates.

 

As for the WD Utility, it may be be ignoring the value, either by design or because it hasn't hit the "threshold" for the value yet.

 

Either way, if the number keeps growing (and/or grows rapidly), I would recommend replacing the disk.

 

 

 

Also, to force a surface scan, open up StableBit Scanner. Find the disk in question, and click on the "+" next to the disk.

On the left side of the block map, there should be 4 buttons. The last one should have a green circle with a yellow arrow in it. Click on this one and select the "Mark all good as unchecked". 

This will cause StableBit Scanner to rescan the disk.

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Ah, okay. Then yeah, that's probably not a good thing then. :(

 

As for why the WD tool gave the drive an "all clear" ... some SMART values are marked as "pre failure", meaning that they're "more important. Also, there is a threshold value on most drives. If the value isn't marked as pre-failure (and I don't think it is), and it's not above the threshold, the drive may not be flagged as bad by the manufacturer's utilities. 

 

But if StableBit Scanner is running into bad sectors as well... then definitely a good idea to replace it.

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