Are these test results typical of an SMR HD?

How, what, where and why - when using the software.
bsthdd
Posts: 1
Joined: 2021.06.03. 01:17

Are these test results typical of an SMR HD?

Post by bsthdd »

Hello, I performed the admin's recommended set of tests for a brand new HD (1. short self-test 2. extended self-test 3. write test 4. reinitialize disk surface). The pictures are after the final test using USB 3.0. Would I be correct in assuming that these results are typical of an SMR HD, and that it's safe to use as long as the health remains at 100%? Mine is a 2 TB WD external so there's no doubt that it utilizes SMR.
1.png
1.png (121.72 KiB) Viewed 2086 times
2.png
2.png (53.69 KiB) Viewed 2086 times
Also, it's normal to have to initialize the disk afterwards since the final test deletes the partition table, right? Apologies if that's a very basic question, I'm quite new to this!
User avatar
hdsentinel
Site Admin
Posts: 3010
Joined: 2008.07.27. 17:00
Location: Hungary
Contact:

Re: Are these test results typical of an SMR HD?

Post by hdsentinel »

Yes, these results can happen on an SMR hard disk drive. Yes, exactly as you can wrote: until the health remains 100% and no errors reported in the text description and during the tests (no yellow, no red blocks on the surface map) then everything is working correctly as expected.
With SMR drives, the performance may vary and can drop (resulting the darker green blocks and the drop of the performance graph), especially during a such intensive test.

Yes, the Reinitialize disk surface test overwrites all sectors and clears the partition table too. So then the disk drive seems new (uninitialized) in Windows Disk Management, so you will need to initialize, then create and format partition(s) to use it for real storage. Of course as the tests already verified/confirmed that the disk drive is perfect, you can use quick format at this point, no need to perform a complete format.
Post Reply