Category Archives: S.M.A.R.T.

And now I’m done with Steve Gibson (and SpinRite)

Is SpinRite a scam? Is S.G. a charlatan? People have accused Steve Gibson of being a charlatan and his SpinRite software of being little more than a scam. As you may or may not know S.G. is working on an update for the SpinRite DOS software, SpinRite 6.1. This has been a process that has… Read More »

Decoding Status from NVMe SMART logs

I noticed this question a lot (on SuperUser for example) and I wondered about it myself too. Questions like: Decyphering NVMe SMART error root@truenas[~]# smartctl -l error /dev/nvme4 smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p12 amd64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF SMART DATA SECTION === Error Information (NVMe… Read More »

Seagate RAW SMART Attributes to Error Converter

Convert Seagate SMART RAW values for attributes: 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 7 Seek_Error_Rate 195 ECC_On_the_Fly_Count to actual errors. These values are known to display huge numbers, often leading to unnecessary worries or even panic. The RAW values however represent both an event count and the number of errors: IOW how many reads and how many errors during… Read More »

Sector reallocation on hard drives explained.

I notice much nonsense online about bad sector reallocation on hard drives while in essence it is quite simple: Conditions for sector reallocation are: Non-recovered write errors When a write operation can not be completed after the Error Recovery Procedure (ERP) is fully carried out, the sector(s) are reallocated to the spare location. An error is… Read More »

Reallocated sectors, pending sectors and event count. Dealing with bad sectors.

It often goes like this. Your PC is acting weird, sluggish. You can’t put your finger on it. Someone, maybe in an online forum, suggests you may have hard disk problems. The term bad sectors is used. Windows Event Viewer may refer to a bad block. It is then suggested to look at the disk’s… Read More »

HD Sentinel Beta 5.01.5 adds NVMe SSD status support

Just a quick heads up, beta for HD Sentinel 5.01.5  is available here: www.hdsentinel.com/beta5/hdsentinel_pro_setup_5015-jjmfl.zip – detection of NVMe SSD status when Intel chipset RAID controller driver installed: detect complete status of standalone NVMe SSDs and NVMe SSDs configured as RAID (Intel Z270 chipset) – added detection of complete disk status when ASMEDIA ASM1352R external USB… Read More »

Like and win a FREE license for HD Sentinel!

We give away 10 lifetime HD Sentinel Pro licenses (value $29.95)!  We’ll give away a license every 10 likes! Ended! As we have 10 licenses to give away, we reached out goal! We will draw winners later today and announce them on our FB page. Thank you all!!!! What do you have to do? Visit… Read More »

Can my data be recovered using file recovery software if …

“Can my data be recovered using file recovery software if ..” , or, “can I recover my data after ..” is the most common type of pre-sale question I get. In this article I focus on Windows file systems (FAT(32) and NTFS). Note: In this article we will assume the disk is physically intact: It spins… Read More »