Hard Drive Maintenance & Diagnostics - Please help

[Bulk3y]

I have had an internal Western Digital Green WD20-EARX hard drive for a few years now. I am concerned about its condition and durability. I had a sudden and unexpected issue with another external drive for which I hope to seek assistance in the future. I have come to realize that a 'good' SMART status is misleading, and can't be relied upon, the hard way.

Crystal Disk Info shows that the Power On Count is 787 and the Power On Hours 5585 hours, both of which seems like a lot. HD Tune says Raw Read Error Rate is 2, and Start/Stop Count is 2606. Does anyone know what the average such values of hard drives are before they end up failing?

I ran a surface scan of ViVard 1.0 (from Hiren's BootCD) with no LBA errors. Does anyone know of a reliable program they would recommend for surface scans? I tried running scans with MHDD 4.6, Victoria, and HDAT 4.53 (also in Hiren) but couldn't get them to initiate.

Even if the surface tests out okay, there could be an issue with the mechanics. Sometimes the hd idles/spins up again once it had already done so within that minute (while watching an episode). Aren't there programs that can diagnose the condition of the hdd mechanics? Any recommended ones if so?

I ran into tools on WD site that can alter hdd values like idle down time thru head positioning and low current spinup (what does that mean?). Has anyone fiddled with these values? If it's recommended, what should they be set at for better hdd health and longevity? At this point I don't care so much for performance or acoustics but more for reliability/durability. Doesn't parking heads, spinning up, and etc wear out hdd mechanics more? Isn't it better for hdd to continually run and minimize idling out?

It's a bunch of topics and questions bundled all together, thanks for taking time to help out.

 

[Charlie98]

Crystal Disk Info shows that the Power On Count is 787 and the Power On Hours 5585 hours, both of which seems like a lot.

I've got a 7-year old WD drive upstairs with 66000 hours on it; just raw hours on a drive doesn't mean anything, per se. CDI is only a tool, it's can't really predict an outright mechanical failure, but it does provide essential information on troubleshooting the drive.

I'll be curious to see what the others suggest...

 

[VirtualLarry]

Crystal Disk Info shows that the Power On Count is 787 and the Power On Hours 5585 hours, both of which seems like a lot.

232 days and some hours, if running 24/7. I leave my HDDs running 24/7 for years, they last a long time.

 

[Bulk3y]

I've got a 7-year old WD drive upstairs with 66000 hours on it; just raw hours on a drive doesn't mean anything, per se.

I leave my HDDs running 24/7 for years, they last a long time.

I have had the hdd for a few years and I use the pc all the time. Yeah, I guess mine doesn't have as many hours racked up so far, but that may be because of aggressive head parking for idling out. One of my questions was whether this could cause the mechanics to mess up faster? Rarely I hear a higher pitch idle sound for spin up from idle, and it really scares me. I realize you can't rely on SMART and need to diagnose and maintain hdds with tools. Hoping for suggestions from users with experience on the matter.

 

[Charlie98]

Rarely I hear a higher pitch idle sound for spin up from idle, and it really scares me.

I have a Hitachi 500GB HDD in an external enclosure that does that. You can hear it spool up and the head unpark if it's been setting for a while. Do head parks wear on it? I suppose, but nothing beyond what they designed it for, i.e.: MTBF.

 

[jolancer]

I don't remember if theres preventative tips in these videos, but i saw them at one point and they definitly give you a better understanding of HDDs if you don't know much of them already.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL516A3C08A0824295

the other HDD tools you mentioned that you couldn't initiate. if you mean the tools booted but couldn't detect the drive, my guess would be it may have something to do with the interface your drive is using. some if not all those tools are old, only one i used b4 was MHDD and that couldn't detect my internal HDD till i changed AHCI to IDE mode in Bios.

only things iv done is smart and surface scanning as you. so don't have anything for you in that respect. But i have an 3.5"WD in a external encloser thats over 5yrs old but don't remember exactly, Its almost always been off though as Iv only ever used that drive for backing up. Never cared to check that drives stats but it must have few hrs put on it and it sounds same as when it was new. In compairison to the 2.5" 5400rpm HDD on the netbook, the Old WD is Loud in every manner. If yours is above 5400rpm perhaps they have not developed budget grade HDDs any quieter.

regaurding the WD tool settings you mentioned. I do not have experience with them. However if i had your drive, i would not mess with those specific settings. But modify simpler settings like how long it takes for the drive to go into Idle mode, just like your desktop power settings. I would suspect messing with the special detailed settings you referred to are for people with very specific tasks at hand, and probably have no relevant impact for average consumers for day to day use. If my comp is on its in use so I don't needa mess with specific power settings, but if i used a drive like yours, and its not constantly in use but always plugged in, I'd probably set the idle timeout to something a little higher than your casual interval between activity. for example if you go inactive for 30~60mins typically, set it to timeout after 90mins, that way its not constantly cycling but will idle if you don't come back.

my opinion is that operator abuse or environment would have a much greater impact on electronics in this case HDDs than any of the software settings ever could. Some electronics are more sensitive or important than others. conserning mechanical HDDs, i would avoid moving them or exposing them to vibration when turned ON, place them safely so they don't get tripped over. use a surge protector. if in storage, prefer to store them in conditioned space, i dunno if theres any significant negative effects for sealed HDDs to be stored in unconditioned space, but in general all electronic/mechanical devices will suffer storage in unconditioned space such as a garage or basement cause of condensation from night/day temp changes, like morning dew on the lawn.

[EDIT: oh yeah another thing, my old WD and external encloser were purchased seperately. the encloser has a fan i can control, i turned if off once to if i needed it, and without the fan on the drive gets Hot. I don't know if that differs from Retail Exernal HDDs as a package, but if its a 3.5" above 5400rpm, i would be afraid to run it without a fan unless otherwise tested cool enough

 

[Bulk3y]

the other HDD tools you mentioned that you couldn't initiate. if you mean the tools booted but couldn't detect the drive, my guess would be it may have something to do with the interface your drive is using. some if not all those tools are old, only one i used b4 was MHDD and that couldn't detect my internal HDD till i changed AHCI to IDE mode in Bios.

Good call on that jolancer, should have thought of that. For some reason MHDD only detected my SSD, not the 2tb hdd. Could be because of legacy size support. Victoria still couldn't initiate/detect anything to scan. Fortunately I was able to scan with HDAT that ended with no errors also.

Maybe I don't have any bad sectors, but there is 'raw read error rate' of 2. What exactly is raw read error rate? I guess its not a bad sector? Would it help to do a low level format with these read errors? Is writing zeros to a disk a low level format?

I randomly ran into another thread about the idle issue: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2085685

Will try to disable idling or at least set to 300 sec.

 

[Bulk3y]

I backed up all the data and ran the wdidle 1.05 through the Ultimate Boot CD. The head parking was set at 8 sec by default. I disabled it. Users of various versions of the WD green drive have mentioned disabling reduces performance or messes up their drive. After 6-7 hours, I haven't had any issues. Ran the benchmark on HD Tune and performance hasn't dropped either. The process seems successful on my WD20EARX-00PASB0 with 51.0AB51 firmware.

I would appreciate if someone filled in on what Raw Read Error Rate (RRER) from SMART is about. On Wikipedia it says "Stores data related to the rate of hardware read errors that occurred when reading data from a disk surface. The raw value has different structure for different vendors and is often not meaningful as a decimal number." SMART shows no reallocated sectors, seek errors, pending sectors, or interface CRC errors. I also had no surface errors from HDAT and Victoria scans. I have another newer exact drive and it has no RRER issue.

 

[silicon]

I've got a 7-year old WD drive upstairs with 66000 hours on it; just raw hours on a drive doesn't mean anything, per se. CDI is only a tool, it's can't really predict an outright mechanical failure, but it does provide essential information on troubleshooting the drive.

I'll be curious to see what the others suggest...

If the drive is not clunking then I would not worry about it too much. The head parking is a non issue in my opinion. Just use the drive and run the WD diagnostic once in a while.