I have a 3TB WD Green HDD and it gave some smart errors recently. So I tried Surface Test with HDSentinel, and it will take 110+ hours to finish! The speed is between 5MB/s to 10MB/s, but all blocks are green so far!
The HDD is connected to the motherboard SATA port. Is this speed normal?
If the surface test is done with no red sectors, can I still trust this drive even though the surface test is super slow but successful?
Thanks!
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As I see on the bottom of the image, 0% health reported for the hard disk drive, so probably it has "enough" problems. If it can still work somehow (even very slowly) then it is a lucky situation - but of course we can't expect that it would perform as fast as a brand new, perfect hard disk drive.
When I first saw the images and the low speed, I thought your hard disk may be connected on USB and limited by USB 2.0 transfer speed only, this is why things are so slow. That could be acceptable, but on SATA port, we should expect at least 3-4x faster speed - but only from a GOOD drive. From a hard disk with 0% health, this speed is even better than what we can expect.
If you use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, it is possible to check the status of the hard disk drive itself, but generally it can fail any time (or "just" the data may be damaged/corrupted on it). Personally I'd not trust for mission critical data.
After 126 hours, the surface test is finally finished! Even though all blocks are light green, the SMART status still shows errors.
My question is, if all “reallocated Sectors” are used, but all data sectors are green, the drive is still usable, isn’t it?
Also, I did a quick test with CrystalDiskMark, the reading is not bad, but the writing is slow. I will only use this drive as a backup.
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i think "write cache" feature is disabled, that happens when drive health falls too low. in my experience it is not possible to enable it by any software only tools when drive itself disables it. in the "Information" tab of HD Sentinel, in "ATA Features" subsection there should be "Write Cache" status. let's wait for more competent answer, i might be wrong...
Not only because "write cache" would not affect the speed in any ways if we write so high amount of data: write cache would play any role only if you'd write only small amount of data (eg. write many small files).
But also because Hard Disk Sentinel completely bypasses write cache during write testing, exactly to force the sectors to be written to the disk surface. On a good, working hard disk drive, you can expect higher write speeds (almost similar to the read speed) during the write test.
