Mysterious health recovery

[BartZorn]

I have a disk of which Hard Disk Sentinel reported 23% health. I bought a new disk and made a full backup. During this process, the health of the old disk degraded to 11%. The backup succeeded without problems.

So far so good.

Next, the disk sat on my disk without being used for about two weeks. It is an external USB disk. During this period, the power to the disk remained on, but the USB cable was disconnected.

Yesterday I decided to do an extensive test of this disk. I connected the USB cable, and Hard Disk Sentinel recognized the disk. To my big surprise, It reported it with a health of 100%!
The test is still running, but no errors were reported until now.

Edit: the read/write/read test ended without any errors.

What should I think of this?

Thanks for any thoughts.

Bart

[flexy123]

You would be surprised how often the cause for problems can be poor SATA cables or a poor SATA connection. I bet it's one of these cases.
Try to re-plug and re-set your SATA cables or better, get new, quality SATA cables, preferably 6Gbs cable with metallic pins. (Some cheaper SATA cables are junk and become very unreliable after just a few times re-plugging them).

[BartZorn]

Thanks, that is a good tip.

However, in this case, it is an external, USB 3.0 connected disk. As far as I know, the cable is a good quality USB 3 cable.
Do you think it could be a cabling problem any way?

Bart

[hdsentinel]

Sorry for the delay, somehow missed your original post.

Not really sure what kind of problems previously detected and reported.
Without some details (actual software version, device model and firmware version plus the detected/reported issues before-and-after) hard to say anything for sure, but will try...

Generally some of the errors (usually the weak sectors, not sure if such reported in the text description) could be repaired and the health may increase. Sometimes this happens "automatically" without any actions, but this usually requires long time, intensive use and usually data corruption (unreadable or corrupted files) happens during that.
But this gives only some percent change/improvement, it is very interesting to hear complete 100% health - after 11%, especially if there was no real disk activitity which may caused any change.

Is it a 2.5" USB drive?
Even with best USB cable (or cable provided by the manufacturer) if connected to single USB port, the drive may not always receive enough power - which can cause unstable operation. This may happened previously which resulted in increasing error counters (and lower health).


Is it possible to use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option? While from that, I do not see the original (previous) status, I can check the current, perfect status of the drive.
Also if you can send a screenshot about the Log page (which may contain changes in the attributes which previously caused the lower health) it is possible to see what happened, which values (and how) changed.

Generally yes, intensive testing in such weird situation is a very good idea - as that can help to examine the actual situation: reveal / stabilze possible problems or confirm if the drive is NOW stable and working.

[BartZorn]

The delay is no problem, I was away from home for three weeks.

I have send you the report from within HDSentinel, and although I got some obscure error message from Windows Internet Explorer, the report seems to have been sent OK.

Regards,

Bart

[hdsentinel]

I double checked, but I do not really see....
Not sure what happened, maybe a temporary connection issue. If possible please send again, just to make sure it arrives.
Would be curious about the actual status.
Thanks!

[BartZorn]

OK, I will try again. But first a question: does HDSentinel somehow use Internet Explorer to send the message? DO I have to set special permissions? Normally I avoid using IE, but it seems involved here.

Thanks,

Bart

[hdsentinel]

It does not use IE in general, just uses Windows own default internet connection method (which used in Internet Explorer too) to send the developer report.

If you encounter issue, you may try this: please open Configuration -> Send test report page. There it is possible to create this developer report, save to TXT file and send manually in e-mail to info (at) hdsentinel (dot) com
This way there should be no problems.

[ZaP]

In my own case on one computer from the past it had an unstable power supply over 60% and any usb powered drives they would start having issues so I moved to using docks with separate power supplies as a way to protect the drive. This lead to another discovery. Brown outs were killing my hard drives so I got a line interactive UPS to stabilize things. Seagate are particularly sensitive to power fluctuations in my experience and lost four out of four within a year which is why I never buy Seagate anymore and stick with WD purple or red now.