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I received a message of crystal diskinfo hdd

scatmanjohn

Sep 12, 2020
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I received a message from crystal diskinfo to my hard drive that said: Current Pending Sector Count Current 200 Worst value 200 Threshold 0, what does this mean? it's in yellow

HDD does not allocate and automatically separate these sectors so they do not receive downloaded files
 

dave9

Mar 5, 2017
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Look at all the other values that Crystal Diskinfo reports. If you have a lot of 100's or 200's (rounded off #'s ending in zero) that is usually just the drive not reporting an accurate value and no reason to be concerned. However it is always best to have a backup of any valuable data.

If you have some different value for read error rate that should cause concern.

I've no idea what "HDD does not allocate and automatically separate these sectors so they do not receive downloaded files" means.

Run the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic utility. It will be able to retrieve at least as much relevant diagnostic data from the drive as anything else.
 

scatmanjohn

Sep 12, 2020
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files downloaded from the internet or transferred from some media to the HDD are saved in bad sectors (badblock) of the HDD?
 

bertus

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Nov 8, 2019
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Hello,

It depends on how the harddisk firmware treats the bad sectors.
In the block from the wiki I posted, you can read about it.

Here is a copy of that text again:
Count of "unstable" sectors (waiting to be remapped, because of unrecoverable read errors).
If an unstable sector is subsequently read successfully, the sector is remapped and this value is decreased.
Read errors on a sector will not remap the sector immediately (since the correct value cannot be read and so the value to remap is not known, and also it might become readable later); instead, the drive firmware remembers that the sector needs to be remapped, and will remap it the next time it's written.[58]

https://kb.acronis.com/content/9133

However, some drives will not immediately remap such sectors when written; instead the drive will first attempt to write to the problem sector and if the write operation is successful then the sector will be marked good (in this case, the "Reallocation Event Count" (0xC4) will not be increased).
This is a serious shortcoming, for if such a drive contains marginal sectors that consistently fail only after some time has passed following a successful write operation, then the drive will never remap these problem sectors.

From the acronis lik:

Recommendations
This is a critical parameter. Degradation of this parameter may indicate imminent drive failure. Urgent data backup and hardware replacement is recommended.

Bertus
 

scatmanjohn

Sep 12, 2020
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is the firmware that does this automatic relocation of the defective sectors of the HDD, I had doubts if it was Windows, SMART, or firmware that did this procedure

Year 2000 HDDs did that?

I use HDDs from the early 2000s and another from 2007 and they have some badblock so I downloaded important files to the internet HDD and burned them to DVD disc so I thought these files were saved in bad sectors of the HDD corrupting them and corrupting also burning on DVD?
 

kpatz

Feb 24, 2014
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Hard drives use ECC codes to not only detect bad sectors but to correct minor errors and detect/report more serious ones. It's not very common for a drive to return corrupted data; if the data is in a bad sector and the ECC can't correct the error and retries can't get it to read, you just won't get data at all from that sector, and the OS will report an I/O error.

Bad sector remapping and SMART statistics are handled by the drive firmware itself. The OS (Windows etc.) also has the ability to mark sectors as bad, for compatibility with legacy drives/formats that don't have their own remapping (i.e. floppies, old hard disks).
 

scatmanjohn

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Hard drives use ECC codes to not only detect bad sectors but to correct minor errors and detect/report more serious ones. It's not very common for a drive to return corrupted data; if the data is in a bad sector and the ECC can't correct the error and retries can't get it to read, you just won't get data at all from that sector, and the OS will report an I/O error.

Bad sector remapping and SMART statistics are handled by the drive firmware itself. The OS (Windows etc.) also has the ability to mark sectors as bad, for compatibility with legacy drives/formats that don't have their own remapping (i.e. floppies, old hard disks).
Year 2000 HDDs have SMART and have firmware to automatically isolate bad sectors bad blocks from HDD?

what is the name of the technology present in the HDD firmware that automatically allocates and separates defective sectors from the HDD preventing files from being saved in these sectors ??
 

kpatz

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According to the Wikipedia article, S.M.A.R.T. was introduced in 2004. Prior to that, it's possible that some manufacturers offered bad sector reallocation in their drives, but it would have been internal and not reported to the end user, or reported through some proprietary method rather than the standard S.M.A.R.T. method.
 

scatmanjohn

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If the SMART standard was inserted in 2004 then in the year 2000 the defective sectors on an HDD were not isolated blocked by the unit to prevent files from being saved in these bad sectors?

what is the name of the technology present in the HDD firmware that automatically allocates and separates defective sectors from the HDD preventing files from being saved in these sectors ??
 

dave9

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Year 2000 HDDs did that?

I use HDDs from the early 2000s and another from 2007

This is not a reliable strategy and there is no information we call tell you that will change that.

You need newer HDDs or solid state storage that isn't already more than twice its expected lifespan. Clearly you have proof that "some" drives can outlast the average lifespan, but it is futile to make data storage plans on something half that old. All further efforts should be on acquiring new drives and moving data to them.

It is not a matter of who what when where why smart did or didn't support anything. Your larger problem is not gradual loss of bad sectors one by one, rather it is complete failure at any time. One minute it seems to work, next minute "click click click" and it's gone.
 

scatmanjohn

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I have an HDD (2000-2003 does not have SMART) and another HDD from 2007, I burned DVD discs from files that were on those HDDs with badblocks, they files are zip files, exe, bin, it is possible to test it to find out if there is any corruption in the files in DVD disc caused when did I download these files to these HDDs with bad sectors?
 

Harald Kapp

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The archiver you use (winzip, 7Zip, ...) usually includes a ways of veryfying that an archive isn't corrupt (see e.g. here for an example with 7Zip).
But: This method can and will only check whether the archive is functionally o.k. in terms of the compression algorithm. It is not possible to verify the contents of a zipped file. If there had been a defect in the file data (e.g. caused by a defect HDD sector that was not corrected) at the time of creating the archive, this cannot be detected by verifying the archive because the archiver will have saved the defect data, faithfully assuming it to be correct.
On the other hand, if the archive had been created successfully back in 2000-2003, chances are that either no error occurred when reading from the HDD or the error could be repaired. Otherwise you would have been noticed about an unreadable sector at the time of creating the archive.

DVDs are not very good long term archiving data carriers. DVDs may degrade with time. When using DVDs, you should regularly verify the data contents an in case of any read errors try to recover as much data as possible, the copy the data to a brand new DVD (or harddisk).
No single data carrier (DVD, HDD, TAPE, ...) can give you complete protection from data loss. If you really, really need to ensure the correctness of your data, use at least two external hard drives with identical copies of your data and store them in separate places - preferably in a safe.
 

kpatz

Feb 24, 2014
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You'd have to use a hashing tool like md5sum or sha2sum (latter is more robust) to generate hashes of the files before and after moving them. If the hashes are the same the file is ok.

As I mentioned before, the ECC in the drives will largely prevent files from being silently corrupted, but instead if an error occurs the file will return an error when it tries to read it.

You keep asking for the name of the technology, the only name i can find is S.M.A.R.T. which stands for "Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology".

If you want to rely on your storage, I'd get newer drives and back them up regularly. Any drive, new or old can fail without warning.
 

bertus

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Hello,

I hope you do not get in the situation I had some years ago.
The SMART gave me the message "immediately make a backup and replace your harddisk"

Bertus
 
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