imsati

So...the wife of a Business Client of mine had a problem with her personal laptop, long since out of warranty. After she explained the issue and I did a bit of digging on it, the problem was traced to the HDD (104 reallocated sectors - enough to make me go 'huh...?'). I did a bit more checking, and had to reboot the system. Upon Reboot, the SMART flashed an imminent HDD Failure warning, so once everything loaded, I ran an in-depth SMART test via SpeedFan, and the results came back 98% Performance, 0% Stability, only now, 657 reallocated sectors (up a few hundred in 20-odd minutes...wow)...fun. I've seen the SMART test give fairly accurate results (personal observation/comparison to other tests I've run, nothing concretely technical) in the past, and some very low Performance/Stability results before, but never saw a 0% returned until today.

Now...personal experience with SpeedFan accuracy aside, *technically* how accurate is it? Or, rather, how accurate has anyone else found it in the past? I'm confident in my abilities to recover any info that's needed via other methods if the drive does indeed fail, but at an expense that the owner wouldn't deem warrantable since there's no non-replaceable files stored on the Drive. While it wouldn't be dreadful if the Drive failed on the next boot, I would obviously prefer for it not to happen as, again, the cost would not justify the end result.

A new Drive will be here Wednesday, so no immediate rush, but responses from those who can attest to the SpeedFan's accuracy in this regard would be appreciated. Thanks much.

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--Jay
Creepy Lurker Guy

Cromewell

I'm not a fan of speedfan, I think it's a piece of garbage but if the reallocated sectors is rising that fast the drive must be on it's way out. I would imagine that speedfan can read the smart data accurately, there's not much you should be able to screw up. You could always try another tool to read the smart data if you are questioning what you see.

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SirKenin

Speed fan sees an accurate result, as seen there:




lmao.

Ok, seriously. Really all it's doing is accessing the data in the hard drive. It's not creating anything. It's giving an easy to read display, that's it. Unfortunately you'll need the program seen here to verify the results. A build here sees the noisiest damn fans you've ever seen in a computer while flawlessly installing Vista SP1 in under 5 minutes. This sees a result confirmed by Knoppix.

Provided you're a tool and die expert and use Gparted for everything from wiping yourself to doing your dishes, you could compare it to the results of this program which is also pretty good.

Holy crap, I should go to bed. rofl. I kill me.

Cromewell

I should have known the albinoblacksheep link was going to be loud. I'm at work and had to ctrl-w it pretty fast

__________________

You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with 'til ya understand who's in command here.

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SirKenin

lmao. Hopefully it got them all grinning at least.

imsati

Much obliged.

Perfect. I figured it was accurate based on my past experiences, but as I mentioned, they only 'seemed' to be in line with other tests - I had done no in-depth comparisons.

Not the case here. I have used HDI before, though. Exact feelings are still up in the air, but I don't hate it.

The Drive will henceforth be babied and treated like royalty Thanks for the responses.

__________________
--Jay
Creepy Lurker Guy