Diskcheckup wildly varying TEC dates

[jeb54321]

First off, I love DiskCheckup. I have it running on two machines at work, and on all my machines at home. And on almost every one of them, it works flawlessly.

However, on my newest "main" laptop, an Asus UL50VT, I have been using the autorefresh feature to collect historical performance data since November, once per hour. But (at a guess) about half the time when DiskCheckup starts at boot, it predicts a failure on my hard drive anywhere between "tomorrow" to... I think the highest value I've seen is 2024. The other times, it predicts no problem with no TEC date.

The most common attribute it records this on is Raw Read Error Rate, but I've also seen it on the Spin Up Time attribute, and more rarely, a couple others.

I also run SpeedFan which detects SMART data, but it's never indicated a threshold problem (but it doesn't collect historical data). I have run various other disk diagnotics, and none have ever detected a problem.

The system is less than a year old, and has received very good care: I always run a it on laptop cooler, I run checkdisk and defrag at startup, I treat it more like a desktop than a portable device, etc.

Since as often as not, I get a clean bill of health, or a TEC date very far in the future, I am fairly certain that there is nothing wrong with the drive. I am wondering more if perhaps there is a spinup/ready issue that DiskCheckup isn't compensating for.

Any idea why this system/disk combination gets such wildly varying predictions?

(PS - I have a lot of data back to November, but the post size is limited to 10,000 characters, so I had to shorten it)

*** DiskCheckup V3.0 Build: 1003 Report ***

SmartDisk DLL Version: SysInfo v1.0 Build: 1002
Time of export: 07:26:12 29-Mar-2011

Device information:
Device ID: 0
Interface: ATA
Device Capacity: 476937 MB
Serial Number: 5VE9EVBE
Model Number: ST9500325AS
Firmware Revision: 0002SDM1
Partitions:
C: 461940 MB

ATA information:

Disk geometry:
Cylinders: 60801
Tracks/Cylinder: 255
Sectors/Track: 63
Bytes/Sector: 512
Total disk sectors: 976773168
Logical sector size: 512
Physical sector size: 512
Media rotation rate: 5400 RPM
Buffer size: 8192 KB
ECC size: 4 Bytes

Standards compliance:
ATA8-ACS Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-7 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-6 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-5 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-4 Supported: Yes
Serial/Parallel: Serial
SATA 3.0 Compilance: No
SATA 2.6 Compilance: Yes
SATA 2.5 Compilance: No
SATA II: Ext Compilance: No
SATA 1.0a Compilance: No
ATA8-AST Compilance: No
World Wide ID: 5000C50021899C62

Feature support:
SMART supported: Yes
SMART enabled: Yes
SMART self-test supported: Yes
SMART error log supported: Yes
LBA supported: Yes
IORDY supported: Yes
CFast supported: No
DMA supported: Yes
Maximum Multiword DMA mode supported: 2
Multiword DMA selected: None
Maximum UltraDMA mode supported: 6
UltraDMA selected: 6
Maximum PIO mode supported: 4
SATA Compliance: Yes
NCQ priority information supported: No
Unload while NCQ commands are outstanding supported: No
Phy Event Counters supported: Yes
Receipt of power management requests supported: No
NCQ feature set supported: Yes
SATA Gen2 Signaling Speed (3.0Gb/s) supported: Yes
SATA Gen1 Signaling Speed (1.5Gb/s) supported: Yes
Software Settings Preservation: Supported, Enabled
In-order data delivery: Not supported
Initiating power management: Supported, Enabled
DMA Setup auto-activation: Not supported
Non-zero buffer offsets: Not supported
Trusted Computing supported: No
Host Protected Area (HPA) supported: Yes
Read look-ahead supported: Yes
Read look-ahead enabled: Yes
Write cache supported: Yes
Write cache enabled: Yes
Power management supported: Yes
Security mode supported: Yes
Security mode enabled: No
Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) supported: Yes
48bit Addressing supported: Yes
Auto Acoustic Managment (AAM) supported: No
Power-up in Standby (PUIS) supported: No
Advanced Power Management (APM) supported: Yes
Advanced Power Management (APM) enabled: Yes
Current APM level: Minimum power consumption without Standby
CompactFlash Association (CFA) supported: No
General Purpose Logging (GPL) supported: Yes
Streaming supported: No
Media card pass through supported: No
Extended power conditions supported: No
Extended status reporting supported: No
Write-read-verify supported: Yes
Write-read-verify enabled: No
Free-fall control supported: No
TRIM command supported: No
SCT command transport supported: Yes
NV Cache enabled: No
NV Cache Power Management supported: No

SMART ATTRIBUTES:
ID Description Raw Value Status Value Worst Threshold TEC
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Raw Read Error Rate 0x000007241B85 OK 117 99 6 N.A.
3 Spin Up Time 0x000000000000 OK 99 99 0 N.A.
4 Start/Stop Count 0x0000000002C9 OK 100 100 20 N.A.
5 Reallocated Sector Count 0x000000000000 OK 100 100 36 N.A.
7 Seek Error Rate 0x000001EDC45E OK 75 60 30 N.A.
9 Power On Time 0x0000000005E5 OK 99 99 0 N.A.
10 Spin Retry Count 0x000000000000 OK 100 100 97 N.A.
12 Power Cycle Count 0x00000000023B OK 100 37 20 N.A.
184 End-to-End error 0x000000000000 OK 100 100 99 N.A.
187 Reported Uncorrectable Errors 0x000000000000 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
188 Command Timeout 0x000000000006 OK 100 98 0 N.A.
189 High Fly Writes 0x000000000000 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
190 Temperature Difference from 100 0x000022110022 OK 66 51 45 29 Mar 2011 14:41:58
191 G-sense Error Rate 0x000000000002 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
192 Power off Retract Count 0x000000000000 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
193 Load Cycle Count 0x00000000A54A OK 79 79 0 N.A.
194 Temperature 34 C OK 34 49 0 N.A.
195 Hardware ECC Recovered 0x000007241B85 OK 54 48 0 N.A.
197 Current Pending Sector Count 0x000000000000 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
198 Uncorrectable Sector Count 0x000000000000 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
199 UltraDMA CRC Error Count 0x000000000000 OK 200 200 0 N.A.
254 Free Fall Protection 0x000000000000 OK 100 100 0 N.A.

SMART HISTORY:
Attribute ID: 1 Attribute Name: Raw Read Error Rate
Date Value Worst
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sun Oct 24 20:05:42 201 116 99
Wed Oct 27 18:20:08 201 110 99
Sat Oct 30 11:05:10 201 115 99
Sat Oct 30 11:18:52 201 116 99
Wed Nov 03 21:24:50 201 117 99
Sat Nov 06 08:53:26 201 117 99
Sun Nov 07 08:13:08 201 111 99
Sat Dec 11 19:23:13 201 108 99
Fri Dec 31 19:02:00 201 114 99
Sat Jan 08 05:31:53 201 117 99
Thu Jan 20 22:07:04 201 117 99
Sun Jan 30 20:39:03 201 113 99
Sun Feb 06 11:48:07 201 101 99
Wed Feb 16 09:45:57 201 117 99
Tue Feb 22 21:58:59 201 117 99
Wed Mar 09 14:34:18 201 117 99
Sat Mar 19 09:27:16 201 113 99
Wed Mar 23 03:25:50 201 119 99
Thu Mar 24 09:03:45 201 117 99
Fri Mar 25 09:06:14 201 118 99
Sat Mar 26 12:09:02 201 114 99
Mon Mar 28 18:43:49 201 118 99
Tue Mar 29 06:39:08 201 109 99

[David (PassMark)]

The TEC date is just a guess based on the extrapolation of the existing data. The software can't really predict the future

So when there isn't much data, or there has been an abrupt change in the value of an attribute the TEC date can swing around.

In the included help file the is an explanation of how the dates is calculated.

[jeb54321]

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

Sure, I get that it isn't going to be super accurate.

My question though is, why is it so stable and reliable on all the other machines I run it on EXCEPT this one?

I don't expect pinpoint accuracy, but every time I've rebooted today, I've been told that my disk will fail tomorrow, yet clearly that doesn't seem to be the case (if my computer SHOULD die tomorrow, I'll post a retraction .

Moreover, it isn't doing that with any of my other computers, most of which are much older and have seen much rougher history.

I guess what I'm saying is: if the predictions are swinging that wildly on one machine but not others, it doesn't appear to me that the program on that one isolated machine is interpreting the data properly.

My thought was that perhaps there is some kind of synchronization problem where the software gets meaningless results while the drive is spinning up and stabilizing, perhaps because of the drive, or perhaps because of the BIOS.

OTOH, if it's truly expected that the results are expected to literally swing from "tomorrow", to "twenty years form now", to "I'm in perfect shape and have never had a problem and never will" and back again, then I'll just accept that and leave you alone.

Jim

[David (PassMark)]

My question though is, why is it so stable and reliable on all the other machines I run it on EXCEPT this one?

I would assume it would be because the result from the drive in this machine are jumping around the place more than other machines.

And the extrapolation method we are using isn't super sophisticated. A sharp drop off in a value can bring the extrapolated date from years in the future down to days.

[wonderwrench]

I'm running DiskCheckup on three PC's and see the same TEC date fluctuations on one of the three. The only thing I see in common with both of our systems is they both have Seagate drives. The system I have that has the weird TEC dates is using a 320 Seagate Momentus XT. I see the same Raw Read Error Rate and Spin Up Time fluctuations. I have ran Seatools on the drive several times and the drive checks out fine. I'm guessing Seagate handles smart differently and DiskCheckup does not like the Raw Read Error Rate and Spin Up Time fluctuating.

Bill

[David (PassMark)]

The extrapolation code was written with the idea that drives get progressively worse over time, in something resembling a linear degradation.

So if values go the other way and spike up (indicating that the drive is getting better or faster as it gets older) then the not very intelligent extrapolation algorithm will spit out numbers a very long way into the future.

In short we should really re-write it when we get time.