Reliability of Western Digital Passport/ Can you interret SMART tests????????

I'm trying to decide between getting another WD Passport or just a HDD Hitachi 7500K 7200RPM and putting it another Ultrabay as backup. My NB came with a Hitachi 7200 RPM and it seems OK. Not sure how to read SMART tests, but both my WD Passport and original NB drive are 2 years old going on three. After running WD's own SMART tests I'm kind of taken aback but this "reallocation error" statistic. Dont know what exactly it means but got to be something bad :-( Thing is my NB I use 24x7 for the last two years and its never had a problem. The WD PP I use rarely. Maybe most frequently in the past month actually in backing up things before installing W7. So total hours of usage in my fair estimation would be 2 months (24x7x4X2 total hours) only. Due to more frequent usage recently I noticed sometimes when I plug it in to USB it wil freeze my NB. Maybe because its underpowered by the USB location I'm using. What do your experts think about the tests? I've posted both. The Hitachi can be had for $80 while the WD Passport (older model) can be had for $100+ shipping. I need reliability.

 

Hi,

From your other thread:
"the[se] test [results] are alarming?"

No. These test results look just fine. The WD SMART program has a nice GUI, but shows only the "cooked" SMART values, which typically start at 100 or 200 for "perfect score" and decrease as they get worse. If they decrease lower than some threshold value (shown in the table you posted) then the drive is considered to fail the SMART test.

More useful (I think) than these cooked values are the raw values that you can read by using, for example, smartmontools. That one has a text-only GUI, but shows you both the raw and cooked values for each drive. You will probably find that both of your drives have 0 or close to 0 reallocated sectors. If you find that they are growing reallocated sectors, that means the drive has marked those sectors bad and has automatically re-mapped them to different physical locations. In the ideal case the drive does this automatically and prevents any data loss. But if you see these reallocated sectors growing, I'd start looking for a new drive.

IMO both WD and Hitachi make good drives.

Standard warning: any hard drive will eventually fail. Murphy's Law says it will fail when you don't expect it, and will take your data with it. Make backups.

Best regards,
Frank

 

I dont even know how to read the WD Tool values. I thought higher means worse. Can you explain and direct me to a Windows program to test for actual values rather than testing from a bootable CD? Thanks so much.

 

smartctl of smartmontools runs from a command shell within Windows. It's very powerful, but the interface is text-only and the command semantics are more familiar to Linux users than to Windows users.

I don't have much experience with it, but PassMark DiskCheckup seems decent as SMART utility that reports raw values and has a nice Windows GUI.

 

Many many thanks! Stats look good eh?
The software however does not seem to detect USB drives.


DiskCheckup Version: DiskCheckup V2.1 Build: 1004
SmartDisk DLL Version: SmartDisk DLL SDK v1.0 Build: 1017
Time of export: 23:03:31 25-Nov-2009
Device ID: 0
Device Capacity: 152624 MB
Serial Number:
Model Number: HITACHI HTS722016K9SA00

SMART ATTRIBUTES:
ID Description Raw Value Status Value Worst Threshold TEC
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Raw Read Error Rate 0 OK 100 100 62 N.A.
2 Throughput Performance 0 OK 100 100 40 N.A.
3 Spin Up Time 0ms OK 253 253 33 N.A.
4 Start/Stop Count 3610 OK 98 98 0 N.A.
5 Reallocated Sector Count 0 OK 100 100 5 N.A.
7 Seek Error Rate 0 OK 100 100 67 N.A.
8 Seek Time Performance 0 OK 100 100 40 N.A.
9 Power On Time 6373 OK 86 86 0 N.A.
A Spin Retry Count 0 OK 100 100 60 N.A.
C Power Cycle Count 1072 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
BF Gsense Error Rate 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C0 Power off Retract Count 298450963 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C1 Load/Unload Cycle Count 10628 OK 99 99 0 N.A.
C2 Temperature 37 C OK 148 148 0 N.A.
C4 Reallocation Event Count 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C5 Current Pending Sector Count 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C6 Uncorrectable Sector Count 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C7 UltraDMA CRC Error Count 0 OK 200 200 0 N.A.
DF Load/Unload cycle count 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.

 

CrystalDisk seems to detect USB drives. Software has a list of controllers that it can work with. But have no clue what they mean. Seems to be a row of 0000's so good?