Question HDTune gives SMART error, Crystaldisk & Speedfan does not...

[old school maybe cool?]

(update: the hard drive in question seems to be operating as normal now. Still very curious as to why HDTune would give off the warning while the others don't ???)

this is weird, at least i havent seen it.

i have a 4TB external hard drive that is connected via eSATA
today i noticed it was taking forever to load the contents of a folder (albeit a really really really large folder)
but loading the contents of the folder took MUCH longer than it usually takes.
however smaller folders still loaded quickly.

So because of the drive appearing to stall out...
I loaded up HDTune and look at "Health"
HDTune says "warning" for my drive health.
I am getting an error on Ultra DMA CRC Error Count - the Data result is 33 (number of interface communication errors)

Tried new cable, no difference.
Tried swapping eSATA ports, no difference.
So at this point i'm thinking this must be a motherboard issue, right?

To verify, i plug in a USB cable into my external HD instead of the SATA, and try it on my tower again.
Same error from HDTune. Same number every time: 33

So last resort, I take that USB and plug it into my laptop.
Load up HDTune on my laptop.
Same result: 33

Totally mystified at this point, but I know it's not the cable, not the motherboard (that's a relief)
so the only thing left is bad sectors on my drive...

I load up Crystaldisk for a second opinion, it comes back 100% healthy
I just now tried Speedfan, 100% healthy, ran a short test, no error -
the Fitness bar and Performance bar both are only one block shy of the maximum.

I would just write this off as HDTune being weird, but today I did have that instance with my hard drive being super slow.

Can anybody make any sense out of this?
BTW all my other drives came back fine on HDTune and i have a tower with 4 other HD's in it.

PC Specs:
mb = Asus P5K-E
cpu = q9550
the HD in question is a Max Digital 4 TB, 64mb cache, 7200 rpm, sata 6.0/gb internal surveillance HD

 

[popatim]

Host screenshots of the various SMART outputs on a site such as imgur and link us to them plz.

 

[fzabkar]

CrystalDiskInfo has a Text Copy function.

 

[old school maybe cool?]

Host screenshots of the various SMART outputs on a site such as imgur and link us to them plz.

Sure np

https://imgur.com/a/AM92mDl

View: https://imgur.com/a/AM92mDl


FYI the drive in crystal that is red is just some dead drive i havent taken out yet. usually i have it disabled in windows not sure why i un-disabled it, i cant remember

 

[popatim]

Yup they all show it but only Hdtune is flagging it. Probably because there aren't any associated Failed or Reallocated sectors which means its not likely to be a disk issue but a data corruption of some sorts. Perhaps the PC locked up or powered off in the middle of a write, Bit-rot from the data not being refreshed, or something ...

 

[old school maybe cool?]

can you help me understand where crystal and speedfan are showing it?

good to know this... i will have to do a sector scan... however i heard the WD util can cause data loss because it will attempt to automatically correct bad sectors

i have no idea if that is true

 

[popatim]

Item C7; the last one in the list. The raw data is 21 but is in hex format = 33 in decimal which is what HD Tune reports.

 

[old school maybe cool?]

i still dont get it LOL but that's alright.

i guess the main thing now is if someone could give me a recommendation on a sector scanner. i read somewhere that the WD diagnostic could lead to data loss, because it attempts to fix the bad sectors as it finds them

 

[old school maybe cool?]

just ran a surface scan using easeus - 0 bad sectors found

i can't make heads nor tails of this situation

anyone know?

 

[popatim]

Yup they all show it but only Hdtune is flagging it. Probably because there aren't any associated Failed or Reallocated sectors which means its not likely to be a disk issue but a data corruption of some sorts. Perhaps the PC locked up or powered off in the middle of a write, Bit-rot from the data not being refreshed, or something ...

Again, probably nothing to worry about> the number wont go down since it's a count of the number of times a checksum error in the data was detected, so as long as it doesn't increase then you're ok.

 

[old school maybe cool?]

Again, probably nothing to worry about> the number wont go down since it's a count of the number of times a checksum error in the data was detected, so as long as it doesn't increase then you're ok.

Welp...
I noticed the drive was loading directories / lists of files SUPER slow again
(Last time a run of chkdsk seemed to solve the problem)
This time I ran chkdsk again, but this time no errors were returned, unlike the last time.

SO now when I pull up HDTune, instead of it returning "33" for C7, it is now returning "37"
...
This can't be good...

 

[fzabkar]

They're just interface errors. I wouldn't worry about them. They would be detected and corrected in a flash. They wouldn't cause perceptible delays.

Your model number appears to be a rebadged Hitachi HUS724040ALE640. That would explain the odd "Power-On Hours Count". The fact that it is a 6GBps SATA model might also explain the interface errors. Perhaps there is a way to limit the interface speed to 3Gbps. This should stabilise the communications.

You might be able to use Niagara or Hugo for this:
https://files.hddguru.com/download/Software/HGST/

BTW, would you mind helping us to understand the Power-On Time SMART attribute? Could you record the SMART data twice, approximately 1 hour apart, and then see whether the raw data increases by 1 or some other value?

 

[old school maybe cool?]

BTW, would you mind helping us to understand the Power-On Time SMART attribute? Could you record the SMART data twice, approximately 1 hour apart, and then see whether the raw data increases by 1 or some other value?

Yep I tested that today, it went as it should.
about 145 pm it was 10882
Just now (5 hrs later) it is10887

I will check out the Niagara/Hugo thing now...

Thank you!

 

[fzabkar]

Thanks.

 

[old school maybe cool?]

Well, I installed both Niagara and Hugo
both of t hem are WAY over my head
so I guess if there is anything else I can do to keep my drive from loading so damn slow, that would be a big help

 

[old school maybe cool?]

this hard drive is still reeeeally struggling

hdtune is returning more errors

i've noticed a ton of audio files are corrupted

and other files i'm sure, i tried to load up a ROM for a video game emulator and it just stuck on a black screen after i got through the intro

any suggestions?
thanks

(on the left is the HDTUNE report from earlier, same one that is earlier in this thread)
(on the right is the report i just did tonight)