Please check these stats and evaluate my 4 day old WD20EARS!

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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Hi everyone,

                  I bought this HDD recently alothough aware of the issues surrounding it. I was certain that WD must have solved them by now…my HDD is from FEB 2011. Here is the HD Tune health check…

Please guide me on these stats:

As you can see. there is a WARNING in status! Is there anything wrong??

Does my drive have physical damage or BAD SECTORS?

Also Considering I’ve been only been 4-5 days…Is that LOAD CYCLES NO. ok?

Thank you for reading this, awaiting a helpful reply.

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:dizzy_face:

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A “pending” sector is one that the drive has been unable to read. The next time the OS writes to this sector, the drive will retest it and returned it to service if good, or replace it with a spare if bad. In the latter case you will see the Reallocated Sector Count increase by 1. In short, a pending sector is not a good sign, but it is not serious either. Just watch the SMART data, and backup regularly. If the numbers increase on a regular basis, then that would be a cause for concern.

As for the Load Cycle Count, 202 cycles in 44 Power On Hours works out to 1 load cycle every 13 minutes. That sounds OK to me. If the number bothers you, then you could apply WD’s WDIDLE3 utility.

See this thread:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/wdidle3-can-be-used-on-wd10ears-official-reply-from-support/td-p/126000

RE2GP Idle Mode Update Utility (wdidle3_1_05.zip):
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113〈=en

I would also examine HD Tune’s read benchmark graph. Look for a smooth, monotonically decreasing curve with no major dips. There should also be no significant scatter of data points in the access time graph.

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Thanks a lot fzabkar.

Are you sure that the LOAD CYCLE COUNT rate is ok?

How many Load Unload cycles can this particular model endure?

It seems if we assume the rate at 1 load cycle every 13 minutes.

then 60 / 13 = 4.61538462 (rate of load cycles per hour)

then   4.61538462 * 24 = 110.769231 ( 24-hour/one day load cycle count)

then   110.769231 * 365 = 40430.7693  (365 day/whole year load cycle count)

Is that normal?

If we assume the endurance to about 300,000 load cycles then.

40430.7693*???=  300,000

  300000 /  40430.7693 = 7.42009131 ( lifespan of HDD in years.)

  Is this normal?

  I hope I am not boring you with this.

  I will do the test you mentioned and post the results in a while thanks again! :smiley:

 !! UPDATE!!

 Here are the results.

 I thought the first one had a problem, So I re-took the test.

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I get the same result. Only you can decide whether 7.5 years at 24/7 is acceptable.

WD’s datasheet rates the WD20EARS for 300,000 load/unload cycles.

WD Caviar Green Series Disti Spec Sheet:
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701229.pdf

The dips in the read benchmark graph could be due to interference from background tasks in Windows. Otherwise the access time graph looks very good, ie no scatter. BTW, the width of the graph is about 11 msec which corresponds to the latency of one revolution for a 5400 RPM drive.

FYI, here is a thread where someone has recorded 33092 load/unload cycles in 2271 hours:
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?action=printpage;topic=9584.0

Notice that the normalised value of the SMART attribute has fallen from 200 to 189, ie it has lost 11 points. This means that it is losing 1 point per 3000 load/unload cycles. Therefore, the drive will have recorded 300,000 load/unload cycles when it reaches the threshold of 0 for that attribute.

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Thanks mate! I really appreciate the time and info you’ve provided.

I think I can could live with those stats…currently 235 with 59 power on hours.

thanks again.