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Today, I have gone through the process of individually plugging in all my ten current backup disks and checked them with CrystalDiskInfo 8.17.8 x64 in order to determine whether I dare to keep using them or if they are "singing on their last verse", so to speak.

All are ~10 years old and are reported as "Good", except for one which is labeled "Bad". I dumped the report data for that one.

But this "Bad" disk appears to work in practice. It does not do that typical, awful "hangs trying to access the disk forever" when I open it in File Explorer, and I'm able to transfer a bunch of big video files out from it to C: without issues. So what does it mean that it's "Bad"? And can I really trust that my other ones are really "Good", if this "Bad" one is actually good?

Also, I find it curious that it claims to have been powered on for only 1 hour. This makes no sense since I know for a fact that this cannot be accurate, and all the other disks of the same age and usage report like 100 hours or something. But in the other section of the report, it says "100 100 __0 00000000005F Power-On Hours", which looks like 100 (not 1) hours to me? What is that about?

That alone makes me doubt all the other data, but I'm not an expert on this, so I will leave the deep analysis to those of you who are:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 (05) WDC WD10TMVW-11ZSMS5
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
       Enclosure : WD Elements 1042 USB Device (V=1058, P=1042, sa1)
           Model : WDC WD10TMVW-11ZSMS5
        Firmware : 01.01A01
   Serial Number : [redacted for privacy]
       Disk Size : 1000,2 GB (8,4/137,4/1000,2/1000,1)
     Buffer Size : 8192 KB
     Queue Depth : 32
    # of Sectors : 1953525168
   Rotation Rate : 5200 RPM
       Interface : USB (Serial ATA)
   Major Version : ATA8-ACS
   Minor Version : ----
   Transfer Mode : ---- | SATA/300
  Power On Hours : 1 hours
  Power On Count : 49 count
     Temperature : 24 C (75 F)
   Health Status : Bad
        Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, NCQ, GPL
       APM Level : 0080h [ON]
       AAM Level : ----
    Drive Letter : G:

-- S.M.A.R.T. --------------------------------------------------------------
ID Cur Wor Thr RawValues(6) Attribute Name
01 __1 __1 _51 000000001CF4 Read Error Rate
03 161 160 _21 000000001356 Spin-Up Time
04 100 100 __0 000000000038 Start/Stop Count
05 200 200 140 000000000000 Reallocated Sectors Count
07 200 200 __0 000000000003 Seek Error Rate
09 100 100 __0 00000000005F Power-On Hours
0A 100 253 __0 000000000000 Spin Retry Count
0B 100 253 __0 000000000000 Recalibration Retries
0C 100 100 __0 000000000031 Power Cycle Count
C0 200 200 __0 00000000000B Power-off Retract Count
C1 200 200 __0 000000000066 Load/Unload Cycle Count
C2 126 104 __0 000000000018 Temperature
C4 200 200 __0 000000000000 Reallocation Event Count
C5 200 197 __0 000000000021 Current Pending Sector Count
C6 100 253 __0 000000000000 Uncorrectable Sector Count
C7 200 200 __0 000000000000 UltraDMA CRC Error Count
C8 100 253 __0 000000000000 Write Error Rate

I suppose "Bad" probably means "Bad situation" rather than "Bad drive", so I will probably have to buy a replacement disk (yet again...) even though I've not saved up enough for hardware to die this frequently...

image version of the report

Whigham
  • 11

1 Answers1

-1

SMART data is only an index whose value is meaningful only if interpreted based on the manufacturer's guidelines, since the standards of implementation vary between manufacturers.

As far as simply taking these values at face value, in all respects the SMART values on this 10-years old disk do not make any sense.

There are no Reallocated Sectors or Spin Retry, Seek Error rates are low, Power-On Hours are 95 in 10 years while being Power Cycled only 49 times etc.

In short, I don't believe that these numbers are correct, which doesn't inspire in me any confidence in this disk.

The "Bad" label was probably inspired by Read Error Rate being 7412. This parameter indicates the rate of hardware read errors that occurred. Any value differing from zero signals a problem with the disk surface or read/write heads. The higher parameter’s value is, the more the hard disk failure is possible.

The Current Pending Sector Count is also 31, which indicates the number of unstable sectors on the disk drive that haven't been managed to remap or reallocate.

In short, errors are indicated, even if the values look somewhat funny, so you would do wisely to not trust this disk in the long term, even if it works for the moment.

References :

harrymc
  • 498,455