Monitoring Win7 Disk Retries

[Andrew Mawson]

I've recently (in the last 6 months) had two Win7 systems where the C: drive has failed. Symptoms are, system slows down and the drive activity light seems to be on for an inordinate amount of time. In neither case were there any reports of problems from the operating system. Eventually they got to the stage where things were painfully slow, yet the usual re-booting, clean up and de-fragging had no effect. Replacing the drives in both cases restored the systems to the crisp response that they previously had.

So, is there any way of monitoring drive degradation? I assume that the controller was managing re-tries until it got to a state that xxx attempts to read something failed, but I'd like to get a bit of warning in future :)

Andrew

[Andy Burns]

Run a SMART analysis program every now and then? One that seems to be kicking about on my machine is HDDscan

There are likely to be equivalents that run continuously in the tray.

[polygonum]

Recently used CrystalDiskInfo to produce sufficient information to persuade PC World to replace a hard disc in a laptop.

The event logs contained sporadic specific "I've had a problem" records, but the SMART reports were very convincing. So the people told me!

Ghastly website!

[Ranger]

Yes, that sort of thing should show up on the SMART report.

gives you the SMART report but its not that easy to interpret.

HD Sentinel will monitor the drive continuously and will warn you about what it decides is a hard drive with a problem, but isn't free.

I assume that the

Yes.

Yeah, that's what SMART is for.

[Vir Campestris]

Speedfan is the one I use. It has some other diagnostics too.

Andy

[Jonno]

Andrew Mawson scribbled

Try this

Free versions pop up every so often.

[The Natural Philosopher]

GOOGLE 'SMART DISK SOFTWARE'

All recent disks come with monitoring and diagnostic capabilities and there are many free clients to access this, some of which even work with Windows.

[Brian-Gaff]

Actually I think just doing a test a couple of times a day should show up the issues. One thing I noticed in the smart data interpretation on one machine was that many have a warning that the drive has been power cycled more than a drive of that number of hours use would in normal use. This they t say can be a precursor to an issue with power plugs getting a bit loose so its always worth every so often going into machines and cleaning out the muck from fans and reseating any plugs and sockets. Brian

[Brian-Gaff]

Does not some other software do this, I'm sure I recall a bit of natty programming that sent the smart to a web site which then sent a report of expected results and yours for that drive type with warnings against the dodgy bits. However and I don't want to be a kiljoy yere, I had similar issues to the ones in this thread and eventually it was traced to the controller chip on the motherboard actually corrupting the drives. Brian

[Ranger]

Yes, HD Sentinel does, like I said.

The SMART report does that, without using a web site.

Yeah, its about the most common failure mode of hard drives apart from just stopping and not ever working again due to component failure.

That is a very uncommon failure mode.

It isn't that uncommon for the read circuitry to have a real problem reading the drive but which does succeed eventually with multiple reads. It?s the multiple reads that produces the noticeable slowdown.

Not surprising that that happens given how weak the signal at the heads is with modern very high bit density drives.