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Hard Disk Sentinel PRO - Mini-Review

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superboyac:
lol I have no idea what that stuff means.  I have the program also, i don't think I've ever run the detailed tests.

4wd:
I'm not sure it's worth looking at the RRER unless you find that the HDD is repeatedly taking to long to serve some data.

I have 1 x WD, 2 x Samsung, 1 x Seagate HDDs, and 1 x Sandisk SSD in my machine - only the Seagate and Sandisk report anything other than zero for RRER and they are the youngest of the HDDs.

The Samsung's and the WD are each 5+y.o., the Seagate ~3 y.o., and the SSD ~3y.o.

Maybe it's better to just use the same metrics that BackBlaze use unless you notice there is a problem with data communication for the HDD.

SMART stats are inconsistent from hard drive to hard drive.
--- End quote ---

Addendum: On another machine I've got a Seagate 500LT012 (2.5" HDD) that is less than a month old, it reports 34024025 for RRER.  It also has a Sandisk SSD that is about 2y.o. which doesn't report RRER at all.

I think the comment above from the BackBlaze blog is pretty much spot on.

IainB:
@4wd: Yes, I had come to the same conclusions as you seem to have done. There are some notes on the HDS site that indicate (in rather tortured English) more or less what the BackBlaze comment says (which I had not seen, so thanks for the link).

I think I may have deduced what those two SMART charts mean:

* The SER (Seek Error Rate): the chart seems to be a graph over time showing when a Seek Error occurred and what the accumulated seek counter stood at, at that point.
* The RRER (Raw Read Error Rate): the chart seems to be a graph over time showing when a Raw Read Error occurred and what the incremental read counter (reads since last error) stood at, at that point.
Explanation: Thus, we have, after an extended period of apparently improving stability/reliability (reducing frequency of errors), a second Seek/Raw Read error occurring on 2015-03-20 relatively soon after the last/preceding error, and then a third occurring relatively soon after the second.

We probably won't be able to establish what caused the errors, but I shall examine the Windows Events logs to see if anything shows there. However, we can see from the CHKDSK output (run after the SMART S/RR errors were charted) that CHKDSK:

* corrected orphaned file errors, and found some unindexed files, in Stage 2.
* corrected free space marked as allocated in the MFT, in Stage 3.
* corrected free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap, in Stage 3.
I don't know much about these things, but I would suppose that, if further S/RR errors occur within a short period, then there may be a problem causing reducing stability/reliability (i.e., increasing frequency of errors). Otherwise, the errors may be an improbable statistical coincidence, or the CHKDSK operation may have fixed something that could have been a causal problem of the errors, in (say) the file structure.
So, it's probably a case of "wait and see".

Yesterday I downloaded, installed and ran Seagate's proprietary SeaTools software to check this (Seagate) disk, and it checked out with no problems on an "extended test" run - and Seagate's own instructions are that if it passes that test then there is unlikely to be anything wrong with the disk.
I wouldn't have known about any of this at all if I had not had the HDS information charts showing the disk health status and the SE/RRE counters' data from that particular disk.

IainB:
Cross-posted from: Re: AOMEI Backupper FREE + AOMEI Partition Assistant FREE - Mini-Review
@tomos: Thanks. By the way, where you wrote:
I guess copying *everything* could cover you if you ever want to replace the harddrive -- but I have no idea how good aomei backupper is at that.
__________________
-tomos (May 04, 2016, 07:38 AM)
--- End quote ---

AOMEI Backupper seems to work very well. Made light work of my disk clone/backup - as described in the OP, "...a bombproof backup utility" - and this was in a situation where the failing hard drive was in a dynamically and progressively deteriorating state, even actually moving down 1% to 54% "health" status during the cloning process. It was so impressively good and trouble-free at what it does that I was inspired to write the mini-review in the OP. Disk cloning was "new territory" for me as I had never been in this position with a failing drive before, nor needed to make a disk clone before and was thus unfamiliar with the necessary process. AOMEI Backupper saved me from a potential major headache with that failing drive.
Of course, I should not omit to mention the huge  value in having HDS (Hard Disk Sentinel), which was what had first alerted me to the problem of the disk's deteriorating state and was monitoring and reporting on its declining health.
Refer: Hard Disk Sentinel PRO - Mini-Review
--- End quote ---

tomos:
Hard Disk Sentinel PRO is 50% off on BDJ today
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/hard-disk-sentinel/

The standard version is free


EDIT//
comparison page:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/store.php

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