I have a LENOVO Ideapad 110 Laptop; Toshiba MQO1ABD 100 (931.5 GB) 850.5 G Free; I5 core; 8 GB memory; and Windows 10 Home operating system. I purchased the Laptop in 2017 and for the most part have been satisfied with it. I monitor the Laptop system with Hard Disk Sentinel 5.50. Because of my limited knowledge I am concerned with the heat more than anything else. But, yesterday the Health, which had always indicated 100% indicated 81%. Hard Disk Sentinel indicates there are 32 weak sectors found on disk surface and I don't know just how concerned I should be. I do make monthly backups with Macrium Reflect (Paid). Additional information which might help is: Power on Time - 231 days, 0 hours; Estimated remaining lifetime - more than 1,000 days; Total Start/Stop count - 2,893. My first thoughts was to run checkdisk /R, and/or purchase a new hard drive but I wanted to ask those more knowledgeable than I am for their advice before I do. As always I appreciate all replies and would thank you in advance. John
I have hard disk sentinel and it is great. It should be okay as long as you dont get drops daily. But time to stick a price alert and do your research for a replacement hard disk. Its a warning that it will be going dead down the line I have replaced all hard drives before they got to dying under sentinels watch. The only one i missed hdsentinel got down to 19% before it stopped being accessible. Basically its a risk from now on.
It is worth doing a SMART test rather than use checkdisk. Short test is usually 2 mins or less but you should do a complete test. This will remap any failing or unreadable blocks. The 1 area HD Sentinel is lacking is the ability to toggle the 3 SMART options in the drives. Most drives are shipped with SMART on, but periodic self-tests and saving of the test results switched off. Smartmon can toggle them so most front ends have the ability. I favour old HDD Guardian but you can use GSmartControl. It is worth making sure all your drives are actually self-testing, or failing blocks go unnoticed til the drive is in a bad way. If you want to know if the HD temp has been an issue or if your drive is operating outside the average range, there is actually a handy way to get comparisons from an unlikely tool. Almico Speedfan has a SMART tab. In there is an option to get an advanced diagnostic of your drive. It compares your drive to others of the same model and gives you a clear explanation of everything that seems out of the norm. This is a point worth considering Spinrite or HDD Regenerator if you want to keep the drive going for longer. Both will read and write the blocks back to themself until they are strong again or actually fail and get mapped out. There is a more basic and free tool called Diskfresh. It is not as advanced but runs in windows not DOS. I use Diskfresh 4 times a year on my drives and it is noticeable that the drive is quicker for reading and writing again.
@jpcummins Weak sectors are not usually anything to be too concerned about as they are not physical errors on the disk. That is why HD Sentinel is not predicting that the drive will fail anytime soon. The Pro version of HD Sentinel can fix weak sectors. https://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_case_weak_sectors.php
Thanks for the replies I do appreciate the information, as I said my knowledge is limited. I believe I know the answer but want to be sure; running the following test in Hard Disk Sentinel will not delete or corrupt programs on my C: drive will it? 1) Short Self-test, 2) Extended Self-test, 3) Random Seek-test, and 4) Surface Test. I became concerned this might happen when I read to completely repair weak sectors, it is required to perform the overwrite of the disk surface. The version of Hard Disk Sentinel I have is not the Pro version, so I am pretty sure it cannot fix the weak sectors. Thanks again!
My experience shows smart data not to be an accurate predictor of disk failures. I would suggest backups, backups, backups! And if you can, image your operating system. So if the disk dies, you can quickly go back to the normal state and without data loss. Mrk
No, you can't with the free version. However, it is non destructive. But as Mrk, said you should always have a backup. This is what HD Sentinel says.
For what it is worth I ran the 3 following test: Short Self-test Status: Successfully Completed Response: OxOO Extended Self-test Status: Successfully Completed Response: OxF1 Surface Test 10/23/20 3:04:03 Error 23 Data error (cyclic reduncy check) Sector 1630861535, Block 8347 10/23/20 3:04:07 Error 23 Data error (cyclic reduncy check) Sector 1630861535, Block 8247 Read Test Block Good: 9999 Damaged: 0 Bad: 1 Curious to what the Ox00 and OxF1 means, if anyone knows I would appreciate you telling me. Last question is would it be to my advantage to purchase Hard Disk Sentinel Pro to fix the weak sectors? Thanks in advance, I do appreciate your replies.
The 2 first tests you did were the SMART tests built in to the HD. Enabling self-testing in the HD itself means it will keep the drive condition more current in the SMART info. Confusingly named "Auto Offline Data Collection" Weird they show the HEX values since they tidy it all up in the GUI. Looking in GSmartControl gives more insight but it is what the drive reports internally rather than the language sentences. 0x00 in the self test section means that either no tests have happened or the last test was successful. As long as the HD Sentinel repair is non-destructive it is worth considering buying it. You should also consider Spinrite, HDD Regenerator and compare the pricing and limits of each licence. All will likely achieve similar results but Spinrite is the industry standard. Diskfresh is worth using as it is free for home users and so far I have found it very good, though much more basic.
I purchased Hard Disk Sentinel Pro and from the exceptional advice I have received did what was necessary to correct the health of my computer. The health is now back to 100%. I want to again thank everyone for the help each one offered. This site and the help I have received over the years has been outstanding and has saved me a lot of money. Again, thanks very much!
I will be purchasing a new hard drive tomorrow; the drive now has 200 bad sectors and the health has dropped to 42%. I again used Hard Disk Sentinel Pro to repair the disk and once again it shows 100% health and temp of 36C. However, when I ran Macrium Reflect 7, Home Edition, it failed to verify the backup. I can do a backup without doing a verification, but I believe each backup should be verified. I will be taking the laptop into a computer repair show to have this done. Am I right in assuming that it would be best if they transferred what is on the hard drive to the new hard drive rather than using a backup? I believe the backups I have would be safe, but I don't like taking any chances. Any suggestions or recommendations? All replies will be welcome, thanks in advance.
Hello @jpcummins 36C/97F is very reasonable. Perhaps you should consider a SSD and enjoy the improvements. HTH
Hello @jpcummins Perhaps more open to debate is the possibility of increasing RAM for increased system speed. Many suggest 8GB is the minimum "sweet spot" for Windows 10. To a lesser degree, 16GB, or more, of RAM would also permit somewhat better performance and go a long way to future proof your notebook. HTH
To be perfectly honest I hadn't thought of either an SSD or increasing RAM. The laptop is going on 5 years old and how much longer it will last is anyone's guess. Regardless I will discuss this as a possibility when I take it in to the repair shop. Should I be concerned how the hard drive contents is transferred to either another hard drive or SSD? My thinking was it would be safer by not restoring with a backup. Had I not been able to verify the backup I am not sure I would have noticed a problem. I thought Hard Disk Sentinel Pro had resolved the health issue completely but maybe not? Unless of course I have other computer problems that I am not aware of.
jpcummins, The best upgrade you can make to your computer is to add a SSD. They aren't much more expensive than a HD. Restore your backup image to the new SSD. If you notice OS issues related to the previously damaged HD you can always install a new OS on the SSD. But your current OS is performing normally.
I have a laptop that I purchased in 2009. Dual core, 8 GB of RAM, and currently SSD. The SSD upgrade allows it to still be usable. If it still had the original drive it would be in the trash.
Agreed. But until they are available in high capacity, like 12+TB for NAS, that is not going to be an option.
For who? I'm not sure of the relevance of the comment to this thread. If you're thinking about the high-end NAS consumer, you could probably buy something like the Synology DS620slim with 6 4TB 2.5" SATA drives (such as Samsung 860's or Western Digital SA500's, see compatibility chart) for 20TB of RAID 5 capacity. It would likely cost you somewhere around $4000, but you could do it. No idea what the performance specs would be, but they likely would be limited by the enclosure and not the drives. If you are referring to enterprise use, they already have systems like Dell EMC VMAX All Flash storage arrays that scale out to 4PB. I don't think SSD / flash-based storage is capacity limited... I think it's still largely a matter of what's cost-effective and appropriate for each market. Back to the topic at hand, though, normal-sized SSDs in the 500GB to 2TB range are very effective performance upgrades for most users. Most consider them well worth the cost in that storage range.
I'm just saying that sometimes it might not be possible to go with SSDs, as Brian K suggested. Platter-based drives are still more cost effective.
jpcummins, You might not need a SSD as large as your HD. It depends how much "junk" you have in the HD. A 128 GB SSD in a laptop is quite large enough for me. You only have 80 GB used space on your 1 TB HD. A 250 GB SSD would be fine. Even a 128 GB SSD could be OK.
I now have a Kingston SA400S37240G SSD. I would like to set the temperature alerts in Hard Disk Sentinel Pro, does anyone know what the minimum and maximum temperatures should be. And, if there is any diagnostic software that I should not use. I certainly appreciate the recommendation and suggestions I have received. Thanks so much!
Maybe this will be of help. https://superuser.com/questions/159...:~:text=Most SSDs are rated for,(2.5” SATA, M. You don't need to use any diagnostic software on a SSD. Hard Disk Sentinel will let you know if the drive has any issues.
Hello @jpcummins Please consider verifying the OS's scheduled TRIM setting to assist in optimizing performance. https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials...-support-solid-state-drives-windows-10-a.html HTH
