Low Health but Surface test ok

[drtanz]

My drive is listed at 4% health. However when I tried a surface test it gave me no errors. I then ran a Reinitialise disk surface test, again all sectors were green and OK. Is the drive ok or not?

The warning I got before and after the tests in the Overview screen is the following:

There are 317 bad sectors on the disk surface. The contents of these sectors were moved to the spare area.
The drive found 140 bad sectors during its self test.
Based on the number of remapping operations, the health of the disk was decreased in different steps.
At this point, warranty replacement of the disk is not yet possible, only if the health drops further.
It is recommended to examine the log of the disk regularly. All new problems found will be logged there.

It is recommended to backup immediately to prevent data loss.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message.

Yes, this is the optimal result. It means that the hard disk successfully identified and re-allocated all bad sectors.
They are no longer accessible by any means (including the tests of Hard Disk Sentinel) so they do not cause further problems
(click on the "?" next to the text description or check http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#health for more information about "bad sectors").

In this case, the hard disk still shows the detected problems ever found in its lifetime.
However, by using Hard Disk Sentinel, you can clear the reported problems from the text description and restore the health to a higher level.
This would acknowledge the displayed problems and then you'll see any further problems (if there will be any in the future).

Please check the article at http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq_repair_ha ... _drive.php
which describes exactly this situation and shows the recommended steps to improve the displayed health - because the hard disk status is now stable.

[drtanz]

Thanks!

[nimbystripes]

Thanks for the link. It really is a nice article especially the SSD part.