Is it possible for hard drive diagnostics like S.M.A.R.T or western digital lifeguard to miss a problem?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Solution
P
Depends on the type of problem. The Long Test will go through EVERY Sector of the HDD and read it, store that temporarily, write special test data to the Sector, read that back and check whether it has a strong signal and contains the data correctly, then restore the original data to the Sector. Then on to the next. This is pretty thorough, and takes a long time. That can detect a Sector that cannot store data accurately, and also a Sector that already has data encoded on it incorrectly so that the checksum tests on it fail. BUT if erroneous data has been written to a Sector correctly, these tests cannot tell that. So if some of your original data was incorrect (for example, your text document had spelling errors), these tests won't...
Sort by date Sort by votes
Colif

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
Jun 12, 2015
65,460
6,521
168,090
SMART is just a guide mostly, hdd makers mostly say not to rely on it for reliability alone. I am not sure about the WD tests reliability. I would look at a number of tools to test whether a drive is working as well as can be.

Tools like HDtune can run benchmarks on the drives though understanding the results can be a struggle. If it is as SSD you can run AS SSD to test its transfer speed.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
G

Guest

Guest
well in the western digital one you can run a quick test or extended test. I am guessing it's similar to what the HDTune benchmark does. I am asking this question because I have read online there can be an underlying problem that these programs can miss.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
P

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
Oct 19, 2006
11,292
1,041
69,340
Depends on the type of problem. The Long Test will go through EVERY Sector of the HDD and read it, store that temporarily, write special test data to the Sector, read that back and check whether it has a strong signal and contains the data correctly, then restore the original data to the Sector. Then on to the next. This is pretty thorough, and takes a long time. That can detect a Sector that cannot store data accurately, and also a Sector that already has data encoded on it incorrectly so that the checksum tests on it fail. BUT if erroneous data has been written to a Sector correctly, these tests cannot tell that. So if some of your original data was incorrect (for example, your text document had spelling errors), these tests won't find that sort of error.

 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom