Best S.M.A.R.T data viewing software? + Some help

Hi.
I would like to know what is the best software to view the S.M.A.R.T data of an hard drive. Which software is the one that reads the data the most efficiently.
I'm currently using:
- CrystalDiskInfo (My favorite)
- HDDScan
- Speccy
- Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for Windows
- SeaTools for Windows
- WindowSMART 2013 (This one creeps me out)

I provided screenshots of some of the software mentioned above, displaying conflicting results.

http://imageshack.us/a/img593/2565/crystaldiskinfowdcwd320.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img835/9273/hddscanwdcwd3200bevt00z.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img20/3531/hddscansamsungsp0802n.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img543/7329/crystaldiskinfosamsungs.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img59/3442/windowsmart2013wdcwd320.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img803/740/windowsmart2013samsungs.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img59/5153/wddlgdwd3200bevt00zct0.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img109/2044/speccywdcwd3200bevt00zc.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img24/3592/speccysamsungsp0802n.png

Some say a drive is healthy while WindowSMART 2013 display warnings. Which should i trust?

I'd like someone to tell me if the values of my SAMSUNG drive are fine overall. This drive came with my computer in 2005 (December 23), never had any problem with it. No bad sectors or anything. Only thing the drive suffered is power outage during standard use (happened about 5 times).

About the Western Digital drive. Originally it was an external drive. At one time while it was lying around (unplugged thank god), because of a conflict my mother threw it across my room (about 2meters distance) before hitting a wall and falling on my bed. After that, i ran a chkdsk that would not complete after several hours. I deleted the partitions and tried like 6 times formatting it (quick or long) but after several hours it seemed to just freeze. At some point i ran a long format on it and after about 18hours it finally responded. Anyway at some point i ended up with around 2GB of bad sectors.
Now. I don't have a screenshot but CrystalDiskInfo gave a yellow dot at ''C5 Nombre de secteurs instables'' some days ago. Data LifeGuard Diagnostics reported FAIL for SMART Data, i couldn't run ANY checks on the drive. Would
all fail. Same with Seatools. Then with Data LifeGuard Diagnostics, i rewrote zeros all over the disk. Then with Windows i reinitialised the disk after being prompted to do so, and wrote a new MBR. After that, all the tests with Data LifeGuard Diagnostics and Seatools PASSED! CrystalDiskInfo removed the
yellow dot since apparently that value went back to health. Althought, the Raw Read Error Rate went from 58 before rewriting zeros and doing SMART tests to 62. So is this drive safe to use now?

Thank you.

 

get a new one for $35
Or even better go with a solid state drive, they're getting pretty cheap.

But to answer your question, safe to use as what? All hard drives eventually go kaput and honestly I'm surprised you went through so much trouble dealing with the dang thing. If it works use it, just backup anything you deem important.

 

Yeah i'm planning on getting a/many SSD's. I know all hard drives end up dead at some point, but i wanted to know which software gives the most reliable information about the hard drives condition. I wanted to know if the western digital drive is still good to download and store stuff.

 

Try it and let me know, I've used harddrives with multiple bad sectors for long periods of time.

 

Ok thank you. Well apparently the bad sectors disapeared, i've heard there are logical bad sectors, the ones you can repair, and physical ones which cannot be repaired. Since the drive wasn't on when it took off, i guess those 2GB bad sectors were logical and rewriting zeros all over the drive fixed them.

 

You are correct. Yes, sounds like you were lucky no physical damage happened to the drive when it was tossed (if your software is reading it correctly) and it could have just spun some or gotten misaligned . I think the only physical damage is when the needle touches the platter like during a power outage. I find it so interesting how hard drives work. Now what about magnetism ? Could that cause both logical and physical damage?

 

Yeah seems i was lucky. About magnetism, i think maybe the demagnetised sectors would be overlooked as if they weren't there/didn't exist. Just an idea.

 

actually the smart thing to do is check too see if the drives are still under warranty.
A failed S.M.A.R.T. test while under warranty is 99% covered by replacement.

I would not trust the WD drive at all. see if it's under warranty.
If the power was off then the drive heads were locked in place and "crashes" where the read/write heads actually come into contact with the platters is relatively rare with modern drives.
I have seen some old MFM and IDE drives in which the read/write heads were welded to the platter from a crash, those platters spin pretty fast and something hitting it generates a lot on energy/heat. But that type of crash is rare today.

Once you start getting sector errors, it's time to back up important data and relegate the drive to non-critical use, because it will only get worse.
All drives are designed with slack space so that when you do a physical scan of the drive and defective sectors are discovered, they are marked bad and then the slack space is then allocated to replace that sector, so it is possible to continue to use drives with bad sectors if you scan and they are marked as bad.
But it will continue to fail.
What happens is that the discrete sections of the drive that are magnetically altered, the sectors, over time begin to lose integrity and are not able to maintain a magnetic polarity as well. When that happens and a adjoining sector(s) polarity is flipped, it's magnetic field can impart that change to adjacent "weak" sectors and what can happen is a domino effect that results in larger and larger areas of the platter not being able to hold polarity, and you lose data. It is simply binary code, determined by the magnetic polarity of the sector, and there are only two possible states.
So once you start getting warnings about bad sectors, it's time to consider replacement.
I have seen drives operate for years with bad sectors, and I have seen them go in weeks, it's always a gamble.

For future reference the best hard drives on the market available to the consumer are the WD Caviar Black line of drives.
They are 7200 rpm, are one step below the enterprise class of drives (drives designed for massive RAID servers, often not available to general public) have a five year warranty and in day to day use blow away the other WD lines as well as competitors in speed and efficiency.

Magnets and hard drives definitely don't mix.
A weak magnet will corrupt data on a drive. We used to use hand held electro-magnets to blank drives back in the day.
A powerfull magnet could actually warp the platters or affect other mechanisms in the drive, so yes magnets can damage drives, both logical (data corruption) and physical.

Again running a physical scan of the drive will mark any defective sectors as bad so they aren't used, but still don't rely on that drive for important data, it will fail.

 

Hi. Thank you for all the information you provided. As for the WD drive, i'm still using it to download some stuff, like pictures and pdf's mostly and as soon as they are saved on the drive i transfer them to a usb flashdrive. The files are fine and didn't suffer any corruption in the saving process, and since the drive doesn't have any bad sectors, i'm asuming it is safe to use for a while. Although, the ''Raw Read Error Rate'' keeps going up by 1 point every once in a while. It is now at 82 points under ''Value'', the ''Worst'' being 1, stated by SpeedFan, which i'm using to monitor the drive. Aside from that, the performance and fitness levels (blue bars in speedfan) are near full.

Even though i'm a bit more relaxed about using it, i'd like to know if there are risks of getting corupted files when saving them on the drive; such as gray parts/washed out colors/pixelisation/blurriness in pictures, damaged pdf's (or other documents), video files with green pixelation on some parts of them, etc. I witnessed those on burned dvd's (Kodak, Maxell) that i had since 2005. Just wanted to be sure i woundn't get those by using this drive.

Well, i saved about 450 pictures the other day, and got 2 that had a gray bar down them, but after re-saving them like 3 times each i finally got the full pictures. Althought, my browser had a hard time displaying them too so maybe that had a play in it. Besides, i also had those things in the past on fit hard drives, but only happened upon saving on them.

On a side note, pictures getting corrupted over time (with symptoms mentioned above), i only witnessed that on Floppy's, CD-R's and DVD-R's. While on floppy's it happened after like 2 years, CD's/DVD's seems to take about 5 years for that to happen. I had same pictures saved on a old hard drive (Quantum Fireball ST 2GB), but even after all this time, the pictures were like i remembered them, compared to the 3 other storage media mentioned. So, are hard drive immune to data degradation (aside from bad sectors)? I mean pictures loosing their quality over time?