the miracle! cure for my new-old Toshiba HDD

"And what to my wondering eyes should appear
all the errors are gone, no bad sectors are here"

This relates to @Bree 's advice on the long format fix. what should I allocate? That worked like a charm. But why is the drive not rated as "100%" by Crystal DI, as is my new laptop's SSD? The current 'pending', 'reallocated' and 'uncorrectable' are all at zero. It shouldn't logically seem to be the G-Sense attribute.


After that remarkable fix, I tried my old but very infrequently-used external WD HDD. Surprisingly, the long format had no benefit. There was a quirk, though, in that the long format was almost completely finished but then it hung for a long time. I let it sit and checked again after 4 hours total, when it had finally exited but reported "not able to format". So I did a quick format and it was then again readable, but still had a similar number of errors as originally. Then chkdsk X: /f also reported errors (but fixed none, which makes sense).

Here's the cured Toshiba:

Bob1212 said:

"And what to my wondering eyes should appear
all the errors are gone, no bad sectors are here"

Click to expand...

Nice. And Christmassy too.

The % rating is simply the ratio of how many gigs has been written to drive compared with the number of gigs that the vendor says is the nominal write life of drive.

You cannot unwrite data, so that percentage will inexorably rise. However, even if it reaches 100%, that does not been drive is finished - the actual drive endurance can be a lot higher than nominal endurance.

Vendors are very conservative on endurance (i.e. artificially low) as they are just teying to avoid insurance claims - "You wrote more than our endurance rating in guarantee period - so tough luck" Not exactly illegal but certainly a borderline scam.

I cannot remember last time an ssd failed due to excess writing. Far more likely to fail from mundane deterioration of interface electronic components - heat being the biggest killer. Also voltage surges.

So if your drive has a rating of say 95% after 1 year (heavy use), if you continue to write at same (average) rate, the drive should nominally last 100 / (100 - 95) = 20 years.

By the time 20 years has passed, there will be much larger and faster drives available (based on historical trends).

However typical life expectancy is much lower - roughly five to ten years for reasons stated above.

In the end, ssds are a replaceable commodity and one should always have backups aa one can never tell exactly when a drive will fail. Like people, some die in infancy, and some of old age etc.

No amount of testing by vendors can ever eliminate failures, just reduce probability of early failure (better components etc.).

cereberus said:

The % rating is simply the ratio of how many gigs has been written to drive compared with the number of gigs that the vendor says is the nominal write life of drive.

Click to expand...

Ohhhh... I'd thought 100% meant that it was 100% good. Because this laptop is pretty new.

This is a Scratch-n-Dent Dell, made this year. The processor is new this year, I don't know about the drive.

AMD Ryzen 7 5825U
"CPU First Seen on Charts: Q1 2022" PassMark - AMD Ryzen 7 5825U - Price performance comparison

Check this: it's at 100% but only 873 Power On Hours (36 days). I got it ~Nov 10th. Something seems wrong.

BC711 NVMe SK hynix 512GB
Drive First Benchmarked: 2021-01-23

PassMark - SK hynix BC711 512GB - Price performance comparison

www.harddrivebenchmark.net

[edit below]
and Power On Count = 7019
for roughly 40 days that's 175/day. That's weird. Though it's usually set to sleep after 5 minutes, and it often hibernates.

Bob1212 said:

"And what to my wondering eyes should appear
all the errors are gone, no bad sectors are here"

This relates to @Bree 's advice on the long format fix. what should I allocate? That worked like a charm....

Click to expand...

glad to hear that....

Bob1212 said:

After that remarkable fix, I tried my old but very infrequently-used external WD HDD. Surprisingly, the long format had no benefit. There was a quirk, though, in that the long format was almost completely finished but then it hung for a long time. I let it sit and checked again after 4 hours total, when it had finally exited but reported "not able to format". So I did a quick format and it was then again readable, but still had a similar number of errors as originally.

Click to expand...

This 'remarkable fix' will only work if all the sectors in the 'Pending Sector Count' turned out to be good sectors when the drive's internal controller got a chance to test them, as it did during in a full format. A pending sector is one that may possibly be weak, but is pending testing to confirm or disprove that provisional diagnosis. Seems all your turned out to be false alerts.

It can't fix genuinely bad sectors, so I'm afraid it won't 'heal' you old external WD HDD.

Bree said:

Seems all your turned out to be false alerts.

It can't fix genuinely bad sectors, so I'm afraid it won't 'heal' you old external WD HDD.

Click to expand...

That's the mystery. The old external WD HDD was barely used, and not knocked around AFAIK. It mostly sat in a drawer. Not that much different a life than the new-old Toshiba. Except maybe the sealed package on the Toshiba made a difference. If oxidation matters, then maybe a Ziploc should be used.

@Bob1212

Ghot said:

View attachment 48204

Click to expand...

Cool. What software did you use, Ghot? Howsit show behind the Bonsai tree? Masking?

(My intention all along was to eventually be putting various things on the laptop's screen.)

Bob1212 said:

Cool. What software did you use, Ghot? Howsit show behind the Bonsai tree? Masking?

(My intention all along was to eventually be putting various things on the laptop's screen.)

Click to expand...

Paintshop Pro 7.04 which comes with Animation shop 3
Animation Shop 3 can do much more than I am able to do. LOL



I didn't put the snow behind the bonsai... I just put it around the bonsai.
@Bree can do it better than I can. ^^

I've been using Paintshop Pro 7.04 since the Windows XP days, and I'm still fining new things it can do.
For Photoshop... you need to start when you're born. LOL
I think half the internet is Photoshop tutorials.

Ghot said:

I didn't put the snow behind the bonsai... I just put it around the bonsai.

Click to expand...

Yep, that's what I'd meant by masking.

I'm going to try the paint Shop Pro. Thanks.

[edit: oh, crap:

Temporarily Offline​

Internet Archive services are temporarily offline.

Click to expand...

]

Ghot said:

I just made each dot of snow by hand. There's better ways to do it... I just don't know how. LOL

And this one is too big for 11Forums... Tornado

Click to expand...

I remember from years ago that there are entities called particles, which are OOProgramming [objects]. Then you can use code to create them and move them according to formula.

That tornado is dramatic.

Update: I bought a very similar Toshiba external HDD for USB backups, though this one was 7200rpm and the manufacture date was a few years more recent. It also had a high Pending Sector Count, like the miracle-cured drive. But the 'hours used' for this new-old one was high. That's prbly why trying the same strategy of hard formatting it didn't clear any pending errors.