Software → Warning! HD Tune killed my Hard Drive at 90% testing.

My 160 gig maxtor diamondmax plus 9 did that the same thing to its self, might not be HD tune.

i had HDD's Last for over 10 years

they Died cause they fell on the floor

one was WD 1gig
and one 1GB Maxtor

and i have an Hitachi 6gig going today about 7 years old

it is a notebook drive so u know that it took a lot of abuse

There may be many bad Maxtor drives out there but the 2-5+year old 80GB, 7200RPM ATA133 units I have installed on this PC have been nothing less than bulletproof. They have been formatted, re-formatted, defragged, scanned and imaged more times than I can count and still not a bad sector between them. The 2MB cache is small by today's standards and transfer rates max out at about 40MB/second, but these things take a licking and keep on ticking...

To Doctor Olds... yes, I always leave the quick scan disabled in HDTune.

the only time HDD's Fail is cause they OVERHEAT

I suspect howie1 is right, and it has more to do with drives that were already marginal and failing, but anyway, my point here is that HD Tune did an excellent job in helping me isolate a hard drive problem that other utilities had not clearly identified -- specifically the "Benchmark"; but the "Info" and "Health" functions are also very useful.

I've never tried the "Error Scan" either with or without Quick Scan -- and frankly now I probably won't -- who knows, there's some small chance there may be an obscure bug. But deleting this very useful program entirely seems like overkill. It's hard to understand how software can fry a good HDD unless it zaps the firmware, but it seems simple enough to just not use the error scan feature!

Heat is not the sole cause of drive failure.

Not even close.

Unless you are running the drives way out of their published parameters. WD and Seagate list 60C as the upper acceptable limit for most of their current and recent models, for example. I doubt DR. Olds was running his in a furnace.

»www.engadget.com/2007/02 ··· g-thing/

And direct PDF link to the study itself:

»research.google.com/arch ··· ures.pdf

Sorry to hear about the failure. I've had 3 DiamonMax 160 Gig ATA 133 drives... all in a desktop PC at home that I use as a small server for file backups, etc. It is on 24x7, but is not hammered all that hard except when running backups for my other PC's.. I have to say over the last 2 years I've lost all my DiamondMax drives to drive failures and have wound up replacing them with Seagate Barracudas.

I tend to favor the theory that the test program probably pushed your drive over the edge. Sounds like the HD Tune software is really a torture test.

Kinda like putting an older auto engine on a dyno, cranking her up and watching it go up in smoke

Well, in my case, it wasn't that important to me to use it, more of a curiosity (I think I only used it once). I'm not into running benchmark tests on a regular basis, so for me, it's not worth taking the risk.

Any tool that does scans of every sector can push it too hard. Nothing specific to HD Tune. Though, some tools do push harder than others.

Can someone elaborate to me what exactly SMART is supposed to do anyway? IMHO it's been completely useless.

IE I've had drives that always passed S.M.A.R.T. tests right up until they died without warning and all data was lost and then the S.M.A.R.T. tests would say "Drive Bad, Backup and replace."

Well DUH. Barn Door closed after horses escaped. Thanks muchly! I always thought it was supposed to warn you of a drive getting ready to fail. Mine has always been like "OH BTW your drive died--- Yesterday" kinda deal.

Anyone?

....S.M.A.R.T., is a monitoring system for computer hard disks to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures.

Well, that's the theory, anyway.

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se ··· chnology

Look for some info this page: Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

As it says there are two classes of failures: predictable and unpredictable. With SMART you may watch how your drive becomes more and more prone to predictable failures. For example "09 Power-on Hours Count" shows how much time disk was on power. The longer it's on power - the more chance it will eventually fail (which is obvious). For example one of my drives decreases corresponding percentage from 100% to 0% in rate around 1% per one and half month. You may calculate when it will reach 0%. At that time I may probably begin to think about its replacement... It's kind of predictable measure.

There is another similar parameter - "03 Start/stop Count" with is decreasing its percentage value (but with a slower pace).

My "BF G-sense error rate" time to time is jumping around 100% and 99%. Nothing to worry about that.

From my experience the most volatile parameter is "03 Spin Up Time". It's changes almost every day making prediction for drive failure event from several years to several days ahead

HD Tune shows all set of S.M.A.R.T. parameters in its Health tab. You may watch them there.

Same experience for me. Everything's peachy keen with SMART but BTW, your drive's dead.

Hard drive failures out of the blue are the reason I discovered and rely on drive imaging programs and redundant HDs.

I totally agree. SMART is pretty DUMB! It does give you useful ongoing information (like reallocated sector counts, and overall run time), but its ability to predict failure is definitely inferior to your local palm reader!

You guys, the hardd rive you have was not perfect if it failed using this. In fact, it clearly states that stress testing hardware could cause drives to fail.

A good hard drive will NOT fail.

my 2 cents: those drives probably had some bad sectors on it that were not picked up by other programs. as mentioned before s.m.a.r.t is often anything but that.

i had a hd that had some bad sectors on it and i wanted more detailed info about the sectors so i ran hd tune's error scan.. that put it over the edge and i was unable to boot from it...but luckily spinrite6 was able to recover everything from the dying drive and i was able to back it up to another hd and send the failing drive under warranty (hitachi has a 3yr warranty thank god)

Most likely it was about to go up anyway and the program just caused the head to read a bad part of the disk.... After all it is a Maxtor, which is pretty much garbage even when they are working fine.

I doubt any software could possibly send any instructions to a HD that could cause physical damage, unless there is a severe issue with the driver or firmware of the disk it self (that would be bad).

Wow...this thread really took off. (I had to go out last night, and again today, but felt like posting a quick comment).

I've had a lot of drives go bad over the years for various reasons. (And from many different manufacturers).
I've also probably run every diagnostic test, and benchmark/performance test under the sun, by many different manufacturers and developers.

As I said in my initial post, even when my Drive went bad while running HD Tunes Error scan, I chalked it up to "a stroke of bad luck" or "I guess it was time to go".

Still, in the back of my mind I found it rather strange that the drive decided to die during that test when, for one, it wasn't very old, and secondly, it had passed many tests with other programs not long before that. (Including the manufacturers diagnostic tests, and programs like Hard Drive Tach).

And I'm not talking a Drive that simply failed the SMART test, or all of the sudden had a few bad sectors, but rather one that went from running well and checking out perfectly fine, to being completely dead in the water and un-recognizable.

When Doctor Olds had a fairly new drive go bad the same way, with the exact same program, during the very same test, (and after the drive checking out fine shortly before with other programs), I naturally became even more suspicious.

I still am, to be honest with you.
Yes, I'm aware of what kind of stress programs like this can put a drive through, but it doesn't change my mind about the program.

Sure, it may have been ready to go anyway, and you guys can stick up for the program all you want.....but it's still a program I won't be using any more.

I've NEVER had a drive go completely dead WHILE RUNNING a benchmark or diagnostic test before.
Again, that's not to say there isn't a first time, but at the time it made me suspicious enough to get rid of the program that day, and I won't be using it again.

If others want to use it, that's fine.
For me, there are enough others out there that have served me well.
Until I can kill another drive with a test similar to HD Tune, I won't be totally convinced it wasn't the program that had something to do with it...perhaps something HD Tune does that many others don't?

Again, I suppose my fairly new drive may have been ready to go anyway, but I'm not convinced of that and probably never will be.

But hey, that's just me...if you guys like HD Tune, and want to continue to use it, have fun!

Heh...so much for the 'quick comment', eh?
I've got to head to my daughters house now...Have a nice day.

Is running HD Tune's "Error Scan" any more "stressful" then running CHKDSK /F ?

Or Norton Disk Doctor? MHDD, or any other similar utilities that may exist?

So your telling me that a brand new right out of the box WD 160GB HDD i had die on me last year was because of OverHeating, yeah right.

they WERE Maxtors...they were probably DOA upon opening, just good at disguising it until your warranty expired...

they were the worst drives on the planet before being acquired by seagate...besides IBM deskstars, that is

Sorry to hear of your troubles Doc

This reminds me of a quip from "Support Your Local Gunfighter" (great flick) where James Garner puts all his money on the roulette wheel.
The "boss" comes out,takes a shot of whiskey and says that immortal line.......

Spin her!

Used DBAN on an old computer to wipe 3 hard drives. All were then no longer recognized in the BIOS, like they were actually removed from the computer.

But, I did get a previous warning of eminent failure and to backup on 2 of the drives. They were a Maxtor, WD and Quantum. I believe the Quantum and Maxtor were built prior to the Quantum being acquired by Maxtor, then Maxtor being acquired by Seagate.

Now I backup both of my entire computer's contents on 2 separate internal drives. I don't really trust this method as being fool-proof either.

Hi all, I am the author of HD Tune. Several people pointed me to this thread.

The Error Scan function of HD Tune is a not in any way destructive, it's a sequential read test which is not even that stressful for a hard disk. If a hard disk dies during this test it means it was already doomed and it was just a matter of time before it died.
There are many actions which are much more stressful for a hard disk, for example a full virus scan, defragmentation and so on. But still these actions will not cause any problems for a healthy hard disk.

In most cases you can get a warning if something bad is about to happen with the hard disk. The temperature may be too high, there could be relocated sectors, etc.
But unfortunately it's also possible that you will not get any kind of warning. This can be very frustrating and most people will try to figure out what may have caused this in an attempt to prevent this from happening again.
But HD Tune is really not to blame here. It's just not capable of physically damaging a hard disk.

Thanks for stopping by.

Make that 2 thanks

I have a year and a half old Western Digital 37 GB hard drive (WD360GD.
I installed HD Tune and did the full scan in ~12 minutes with no errors.
I did the bench test too.
I rebooted the computer with no problems.
Seems like a good program to me.

One thing to note in common with both Dr. Olds and jabarnut's cases - they both make mention of having run other diagnostic tools very recently on the drives that died while HD Tune was running.

Maybe HD Tune was the unlucky messenger conveying the bad news of a sudden-drive-death?

I have no stake in this program - I've used it, and others similar to it without any problems. I've also been very lucky in that the two drives I've ever had go bad on me did throw off errors prior to giving up the ghost. It does strike me as pretty unlikely that a piece of software running relatively benign tests would be the actual proximate cause of a total drive failure.

I like this one: »www.simplisoftware.com/P ··· t=HdTach