I have a Dell XPS 420, about 4 years old, out of warranty. Drive C: (and smaller partition as D:) is a Western Digital WD5000AAKS-75YGA0 ATA drive.
Seems to be running well, but the Dell predictive diagnostics say the drive failed a Targeted Read Test and a SMART Short Self Test, but passed all the other Dell tests.
It has done this a couple of months in a row (the tests run monthly..), but the fact that the main hard drive of my PC has these items has me concerned.
What are the 'Targeted Red Test' and the 'SMART Short Self Test'? studiohack♦
Would these outcomes be addressed by a simple chkdsk /f ?
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Howard HoffmanHoward Hoffman
2 Answers
SMART = Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology
SMART errors are the drive detecting errors within itself, regardless of the operating system.
Consider the drive on it's way out, and treat it as such. I.e.: you can keep using it, but don't be surprised when, one day, it's dead. :)
Since it's a Western Digital drive, hit WD's software page and grab their diagnostics software (Data LifeGuard Diagnostics, A.K.A. 'WDDiag').
If you can make a bootable CD or USB or floppy, use the DOS version and perform an Extended Test (it's a read-only test).
Dell Hard Drive Tester
If you can't make a bootable device try the Windows version, but the DOS version tends to find and correct more issues. Fanuc power supply manuals.
WDDiag will either repair the problem or tell you the drive needs replacing (or tell you nothing's wrong with it). I would expect the extended test to take about an hour to complete on a 500GB drive.
Hope that helps..
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chkdsk checks the integrity of the file system, not the hard drive sectors.
a chkdsk /r will do a surface scan of the entire disk and attempt to repair or repair bad sectors it finds, if any.
If you are seeing SMART failures, I would back up your important data and prepare for a hard disk replacement.
MoabMoab
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Which of your hard drives is the fastest, and is it really as fast as the manufacturer promised? Whether you have a desktop PC or a server, Microsoft’s free Diskspd utility will stress test and benchmark your hard drives.
NOTE: A previous version of this guide explained using Microsoft’s old “SQLIO” utility. However, Microsoft now only offers the “Diskspd” utility, which replaces SQLIO, so we’ve updated this guide with brand new instructions.
Why Use Diskspd?
If you want to know the IO ability of your drives, Diskspd makes an excellent tool. Diskspd will tell you the maximum capacity a server’s hard drives can handle, or point you at the fastest hard drive you should use for heavy workloads (or just demanding PC gaming) on a desktop PC.
As an example, let’s suppose that we have three drives on a server: an F drive, G drive and C drive. If we have our MDF on the F drive, the LDF on the G drive and our OS on our C drive, we can evaluate whether our setup is effective. For example, if the MDF file is the busiest file with the most reads and writes, we’d want it to be on the fastest drive.
Using the above example with the graphs (representing the writes and reads for the OS, LDF and MDF), we would place our MDF file on the fastest drive since our MDF is the busiest. If our Diskspd analysis showed that F was our fastest drive, we would place our MDF file on drive F.
Where to Download Diskspd
Microsoft offers this excellent tool for free, and you can download it from Microsoft Technet. It’s even open source, so you can download and inspect or modify the source code from GitHub.
Diskspd has been tested to work on desktop versions of Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, as well as Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, and 2016 Technical Preview 5.
Once you’ve downloaded it, you’ll need to extract the contents of the .zip file to a folder on your computer. Note that the archive contains three different “diskspd.exe” files. The one in the “amd64fre” folder is for 64-bit Windows PCs, while the one in the “x86fre” folder is for 32-bit Windows PCs. If you’re using a 64-bit version of Windows, and you probably are, you’ll likely want to use the 64-bit version.
How Do I Perform a Stress Test?
To perform a single test, you can simply invoke a Diskspd command from an Administrator-enabled Command Prompt. On Windows 10 or 8.1, right-click the Start button and select “Command Prompt (Admin)”. On Windows 7, locate the “Command Prompt” shortcut in the Start menu, right-click it, and select “Run as Administrator.
First, use
cd to switch to the directory containing the Diskspd.exe you want to use:
In our case, that looked like the command below.
Now, run the Diskspd command with the options you want to use. You’ll find a complete list of command line options and usage information in the 30-page DiskSpd_Documentation.pdf file included in the Diskspd archive you downloaded.
However, if you want to get up and running quickly, here’s an example command. The long dark grey mother firewood. The following command sets the block size to 16K (-b16K), runs a 30 second test (-d30), disables hardware and software cashing (-Sh), measures latency statistics (-L), uses two IO requests per thread (-o2) and four threads (-t4) per target, uses random access rather than sequential writing (-r), performs 30% write operations and 70% read operations (-w30).
It creates a file at c:testfile.dat of 50 MB in size (-c50M). If you wanted to benchmark your D: drive instead, for example, you’d specify d:testfile.dat
After however long you specify–30 seconds in the above test–the test results will be printed to the Command Prompt and you can view them.
Consult the results and you’ll see the average MB/s the drive reached during the test–how many write operations were performed a second, how many read operations were performed a second, and the total amount of input/output (IO) operations per second. These statistics are most useful when comparing multiple drives to see which is faster for certain operations, but they’ll also tell you exactly how much IO a hard drive can handle.
You can also dump the results to a text file you can view later with the > operator. For example, the below command runs the same command as above and places the results in the C:testresults.txt file.
Repeat this process for your other drives, and compare.
Customizing Your Stress Test Command
If you’re trying to figure out which is the fastest hard drive for a certain workload, you should create a command that best matches that workload. For example, if it’s a server that only reads data and doesn’t write, you should perform a test of 100% reads that doesn’t measure any write performance. Run that stress test across multiple drives and compare the results to see which is faster for that type of work.
Note that there are many, many other command line options you can specify for Diskspd.exe. You’ll find the most complete, up-to-date list in the documentation that comes with the downloaded Diskspd.exe file itself, but here are some important options:
Using these options, you can tweak the benchmark command to see how your disk performs under varying loads. Once you’ve written a command that you feel approximates the type of workload you perform on your PC, you can stress test several drives and see which offers the best performance.
READ NEXT
While it is always a good idea to regularly check your Hard Disk Health for Errors & Bad Sectors, it is equally important to monitor the Hard Disk regularly, if you don’t want to be caught unawares by a hard disk failure for no apparent reason. Hard Disks these days, use Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology or SMART to monitor its health and send out signals if it is failing.
To check the status of your Hard Disk health, you can use the WMIC or Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line. The WMIC is a command-line and scripting interface that simplifies the use of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and systems managed through WMI. Using the WMI Commands, it can help you carry out several administrative tasks, including, for instance, finding out the computer model name or the serial number of your Windows PC.
Hard Disk Health
To check your Hard Disk Health natively in Windows 10/8/7, open a command prompt window. First, type wmic and hit Enter. Then type diskdrive get status and hit Enter.
If the status of your hard disk is fine, you will see a message, OK. If Windows faces problems in retrieving the SMART information, it will probably mean that the hard disk may face issues and this will be reflected in the message that is returned.
In the eventuality that your hard disk status is not OK, it might be a good idea to keep a watch on the noises that a dying hard disk makes, and back up all your data natively or by using some free third-party backup software.
It might then be a good idea to consider changing your hard disk, as a dying disk can result in data corruption too – before it eventuality dies.
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