I bought a new ssd online and via an external usb drive load it onto the new computer i’m building… I have another hard drive on this computer already as the boot drive so I boot into windows whereupon I attempt to initialize the new ssd as it’s not recognized. The computer refuses to initialize the drive, whatever I do, whatever program I use. I try every trick I know. But nada.
So, I load the drive via the aforementioned external usb connection onto my main computer and manage to initialize and format it. Easy peazy. BTW, both computers are running win 10 v1809. In fact both computers have the same motherboard and cpu.
So then, I connect the new ssd drive back onto the new computer and clone the hdd image onto the new ssd drive, make the ssd primary, change the boot order in the BIOS and all is fine. It now boots on the new computer. Runs fine. fast. I open my program of Hard Disk Sentinel and right off the bat, it reports 8000 bad sectors on the new ssd… OMG So I write to the company where I purchased it telling them it is defective.
They send me out a new one… On receiving the new one the first thing I do is connect it via usb to my main computer, initialize it, format it, etc. and all is good. Check with the Hard Disk Sentinel program on my main computer and looks perfect. Just to check, I connect it up to the newly built computer via usb external drive and once again, this new drive is checked by hard disk sentinel to have 8000 bad sectors. Weird.
Crystal Disk Info checks them both out as good on the new computer, nothing about bad sectors
Anyone able to wade thru my long-winded explication and explain to me what may be happening?
Your SSD was designed with extra ‘pages’ of storage so that as pages fail with age, it will still have the same storage capacity it was advertised as and sold with. It marked these as bad or unusable so the OS doesn’t try to use them. Hard Drive Sentinel is detecting this reserve capacity as damage sectors, for some odd reason.
One of your HDD programs tried to “fix” your hard drive and ended up corrupting the allocation table for several sectors.
you’ve encountered a problem I’ve never heard of and know nothing about.
Of those, I’d say 1 and 3 are the most likely. Reach out to the drive manufacturer, tell them what you’re seeing, and ask if this model of drive is overprovisioned. Or reach out to the makers of your hard drive program and ask if they’ve heard of this issue with SSD’s.
Also, please do not use any optimizing or disk testing utilities (if they perform actual writes to the disk) on an SSD unless they are designed for solid state drives. SSD’s have a finite (albeit, very large) number of write operations per page before a page becomes effectively unusable (impossible to distinguish between 0 and 1).
Nothing like a surface test happening. Hard Disk Sentinel program just seems to read temps and Smart data from the get go. What’s weird is the program gives two differnet reports on the same drive
To point out the obvious, a SSD has flash memory inside, no disk or surface to test. Some of the memory pages may get remapped internally for various reasons, but that should not generate an error.
I would run a third program to display the actual S.M.A.R.T. data to see whether any errors are indeed being reported. You could post the data here?
ETA smartmontools, HD Tune, and many other utilities purport to display this information.