How to check hard disk for serviceability, working capacity: instructions, recommendations and feedback

Surely many PC and laptop users had to deal with all sorts of problems that arose with a hard drive. In this article, we will try to answer the main questions regarding the operation of the hard drive and analyze it with a specific example. What to do when the hard disk is slowing down, how to check the serviceability of the carrier and whether it is worth spending your nerves and time on it at all.

As an example, take one of the most popular hard drives, which are equipped with thousands of computers and laptops - a hard drive from Seagate. The main problem of the "experimental" is the hang of the operating system, or even a failure to load, various errors, creaks and snapping. So, how to check the hard drive on the computer?

Software

One of the most interesting (and free) from the technical point of view of programs for checking the hard drive is HDDScan, which can be downloaded from the official site on demand in any search engine.

First of all, it is necessary to check the SMART parameters of the hard drive (the built-in technology that evaluates the hard drive with the self-diagnostic equipment with the prediction of the remaining "life" time), and then a qualitative test of the media surface will be carried out, identifying bad sectors (bad blocks).

But before we check the status of the hard disk for any problems, we will make a small digression in order to understand the principle of the HDDScan utility, explaining in more detail what SMART is, bad blocks and why some of them can not be "cured", especially since numerous Reviews about this program leave the users, until the end and did not understand what it is like blocks, paths and sectors.

Principle of operation

Winchester consists of glass and aluminum plates, which are covered with a layer of technical ferromagnetic material. That is, in simple terms, a hard disk is a magnetic recording device. The heads, which are located on the surface of the carrier, soar at a height of 10-13 nm and never touch the surface itself, which, incidentally, is very easy to damage.

The conveyor at the last stages of hard drive manufacturing conducts low-level formatting, which forms a "map" of the hard drive, dividing it into tracks and sectors. Also, special servo-marks are applied, which are responsible for the exact hit of the head on the desired track of the hard disk.

Sectors

The unit of the hard drive is a sector that consists of 512 bytes of data, and in order to format the media at a low level, it requires special and very expensive equipment - "Servo", so it is performed only in the factory, and all information recorded with this Equipment, never and in any service will not be overwritten. If you are someone who promises to check the status of the hard drive and perform low-level formatting, you know: at home it can not be done.

The manufacturer writes only service information to the sector: the physical address of the sector itself and the address marking indicating the beginning of the track. This information is often called the markup of the hard drive, and it is necessary for the correct operation of the media, so that the heads of the hard drive fall right onto the right sector and the track for reading and writing data.

After purchasing a hard disk, the user can access almost all of its volume, except for service information, which contains MBR (master boot record) and built-in utility utilities. The area of the disk where these data are located has a greater magnetization, not allowing the user to accidentally or intentionally delete the service information.

Firmware

Data on sectors, tracks and their numbers are represented by a special table, not accessible to the BIOS and any OS. This table is located in the service area, which is a kind of mini-operating system and, together with the Firmware firmware, controls all actions of the hard drive. Some users ask themselves: is it necessary to update or completely change the firmware before testing the hard drive on a laptop or on a regular PC? The answer is unequivocal: no. All modern media in any update of the built-in software does not need.

All the information that is recorded in the service area together with the firmware is the drive's passport: SMART attributes, a table with identified defects, non-correctable bad blocks and remapped sectors.

Types of sectors

Before you check the external hard drive for serviceability, it is important to know that there are only three types of bad sectors: physical, logical and software. The operating system attempts to read the bad sector several times, tries to load the data several times, and if this fails, the OS recognizes the sector as faulty and writes all the necessary information already to the normal sector that is on the backup track. This process is called Remapping, or in common people's remap.

And to hold or postpone the remap, only the hard drive controller decides, and not the user or third-party software, which can only "hint" to a hard disk about the need for a remap. Before checking the hard disk for good, the built-in utilities are always checked against the defects table, where all the bad sectors that were either reassigned by the system or labeled as not being restored are located.

In total there are two tables with defects - the factory (Primary List), which reflects the results of the initial tests on the pipeline with the already marked bad blocks, and the current (Grown List), filled with the accumulation of current problems.

Bad sectors. How can I fix them?

Before you check the hard drive for serviceability, you need to know about the types of bad sectors and the possibility of their further rehabilitation in case of damage.

According to reviews, physically faulty bad blocks can not be restored by any formatting. The only thing that can be done is to reassign the failed sectors to spare from the backup tracks. A significant disadvantage of this method is the decrease in the performance of the hard drive, since the heads will have to travel a greater distance and do additional movements to find information on the backup tracks.

Physical bad sectors are hard drive defects that have a mechanical nature: a disrupted magnetic layer of the surface of the carrier, chips, scratches, etc. Very often such problems occur after a hard drive hit, when one or more heads were damaged and, tightly applying to a magnetic storage device , Scratched its surface. Overheating or vibration, as testified by the reviews, can also serve as the causes of bad sectors. In this case, the bad block is always to be replaced and reassigned by the normal sector from the backup track.

Squeak and click

If before you check the hard drive for operation, you often heard a creaking or clicking inside the system unit, the reason in most cases is hidden in the hard disk head positioner. The media tries to read the information over and over again, wearing out the positioner in a certain position, resulting in a small creaking.

The cause of clicks can be the reassignment of tracks of bad sectors to backup sectors. They are not always near, so the heads often and sharply change their direction from side to side, as a result of which specific clicks are heard.

Another possible reason for clicking and creaking is the violation of factory marking as a result of the mechanical impact described in the section above. Servos can be destroyed, and the head can no longer exactly fall on the sector it needs, so multiple attempts of the carrier to read the information and get into its "rut" are heard.

According to the reviews, the only panacea from scratches and clicks available to a simple user is disk defragmentation by built-in utilities of the operating system, which, if not help to get rid of the problem, will at least make the hard drive work for some time.

How can I check the hard drive for the health of the sectors?

Logical bad blocks that arise as a result of errors in the logic of the sector can be divided into those that are subject to correction and faulty ones. Let's consider, in which case it is impossible to correct a logical bad block.

As already mentioned above, each sector of the hard disk, in addition to user data, carries some of the official information about the markup and physical addresses that determine the beginning of the sector. If this information was damaged for various reasons (mechanical or physical impact), then it can be restored only in the factory, which is very problematic for an ordinary user.

But if you did not hit and did not overheat it before checking the hard drive, that is, the service information in the sectors is not broken, you can restore the data and the working capacity of the medium by the checksum of each sector (ECC - error correction code). This data contains each unit of the carrier, and it is used by utilities for the rehabilitation of the hard drive.

If you believe the reviews, various kinds of software errors hard disk like an incorrectly labeled sector or track are "treated" by the usual formatting or built into the operating system software.

Summarizing

After we understood the principle of the hard drive and indicated the moments that can be fixed and which can not be done, we can safely run the HDDScan test drive and see the results, making the appropriate conclusions for ourselves. There are a lot of positive reviews about this software on the Internet, so you can recommend it to both novice users and experienced professionals.

After you learn the current status of SMART, you can make a prediction - to restore this disk or to purchase a new one.