Is my hard drive going bad?

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Hisonae

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Sep 1, 2014
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The other day my pc crashed and restarted, then got extremely slow. I decided to reinstall windows and format the drive (since I was going to do it later anyway) and see if that fixes things, and it did, it's working perfectly now. But then I tested the hard drive with seatools just to be safe and it failed the short DST + the long and short generic tests and only passed the S.M.A.R.T test. But when I run chkdsk it says there are no errors. I'm confused is it going bad? should I get a new one now or is there a way to fix this?
 
Solution
Solandri
Yup. chkdsk only checks existing files for integrity. With a fresh install, there aren't that many files, so it's not surprising chkdsk didn't find anything wrong. You want to run a surface scan for bad sectors. That will try to write to every sector of the drive.

If it failed all those tests, more than likely your hard disk is dying, and it just hasn't accumulated enough errors yet for SMART to flag it. SMART doesn't test your drive for errors, it just keeps count of every error that occurs. When an error exceeds a certain threshold (e.g. temperature) or number (e.g. bad sectors), SMART then warns you.

(Another possibility is bad cables or the SATA port on your motherboard is going bad, or even bad memory. SMART isn't flagging...
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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Yup. chkdsk only checks existing files for integrity. With a fresh install, there aren't that many files, so it's not surprising chkdsk didn't find anything wrong. You want to run a surface scan for bad sectors. That will try to write to every sector of the drive.

If it failed all those tests, more than likely your hard disk is dying, and it just hasn't accumulated enough errors yet for SMART to flag it. SMART doesn't test your drive for errors, it just keeps count of every error that occurs. When an error exceeds a certain threshold (e.g. temperature) or number (e.g. bad sectors), SMART then warns you.

(Another possibility is bad cables or the SATA port on your motherboard is going bad, or even bad memory. SMART isn't flagging anything because nothing wrong is happening to the drive. But the other tests are failing because the computer is getting data as if the drive is dying. Try putting the drive in another computer with different cables, and run the same tests.)
 
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