Extremely high Power off Retract Count on the new disk

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vit
Posts: 8
Joined: 2018.12.17. 22:54

Extremely high Power off Retract Count on the new disk

Post by vit »

Hello,
I do not know what happened, but I suddenly noticed that my new HDD (WD WD10JPLX) has a very high value of the Power off Retract Count attribute in HD Sentinel. The disk was bought in February, only checked and put into a drawer. Then Power off Retract Count was 3.
SMART and short self test from February:
Image

The disk has not been used since then. Just yesterday I put it in my HDD caddy in place of the DVD recorder. The laptop was turned on all day, though it was hardly used. The laptop has been turned off and turned on a few times. Today I saw that Power off Retract Count is 458754 after 29 hours of operation and even little used at that time.
SMART from today:
Image

I have two other identical WD drives (also WD10JPLX) and although they are one year older and used, they have Power off Retract Count value, one around 70 and the other one around 20.
What happened, how can it be explained? Should I worry (this is a new disk for data)? Can I check something to make sure something about it?
Thank you in advance for your help
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hdsentinel
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Re: Extremely high Power off Retract Count on the new disk

Post by hdsentinel »

Thanks for your message and the image.

Please do not worry. The number needs to be interpreted differently, this is why Hard Disk Sentinel displays the Data field as hexadecimal by default to prevent this kind of confusion.

As described many times on the forum, sometimes the attributes do not work as expected and the high number can be misleading as the hard disk may store different kind of information on the High Word, Mid Word, Low Word parts (which together form a 6 byte number, which displayed as the high value). Exactly for this purpose, Hard Disk Sentinel allows checking these partial fields one-by-one, not only their actual values but how these changed with time, as this may help to identify what happened, for example connect the possible new problems for an event like hardware change, power failure, power supply issues, etc.

If you switch back to default hexadecimal view, you may notice that the low word is 0002 only which indicates only 2 issues. Weird that you previously saw 3 there, as such counter should not decrease.

For additional information, please check this topic (completely different drive but similar confusion): https://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/viewto ... 831#p16831

No need to worry. But if you really want to be sure, you can any time start tests exactly to reveal any issue - or confirm if the drive is perfectly working, see https://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests
vit
Posts: 8
Joined: 2018.12.17. 22:54

Re: Extremely high Power off Retract Count on the new disk

Post by vit »

Thanks for the clarification. In fact, I did not notice that I changed the format of displaying the value.
This "three" is my mistake on the keyboard, it was supposed to be "two".
Thank you and best regards
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