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

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 »

Hard disk diagnostics and bad sector repair using DiskPatch

Using DiskPatch you can repair bad sectors very much like a utility like Spinrite but without the hocus-pocus-factor. Hard disk diagnostics using SMART DiskPatch (DIY DataRecovery.nl) includes a S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic utility. Since DiskPatch runs from a boot USB key it can even check disk health if the PC fails to boot. To create a DiskPatch… Read More »

Why you’ll never see me buy a WD My Passport

EDIT august 2019: Look at the number of issues with locked external WD disks. If  your enclosure ever breaks, you’ll lose all data on the disk. With a non encrypted disk you’d just open enclosure and move the disk to a new enclosure and all would be okay. NOT with those encrypting WD external drives.… Read More »