Your HDDs can be lying to you, even with S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics at DVinfo.net

Andrew Smith · April 22nd, 2025, 10:29 PM

Guessing we're all off spinning platter HDDs now for day to day work, but a number of us including myself would use them for 'shelf' archival storage of projects. For shelf storage it may not be a great risk as the drives will be low usage but it's still something we should know about.

Modern HDDs are lying when it comes to their health stats.

Over on the GRC (Gibson Research Corporation, legends of the internet they are) forums, there has been a post about this.

Essentially, these hard drives are silently remapping their dud sectors behind the scenes without reporting them to the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring diagnostics until after many failed attempts. It only shows up in SMART when things get dramatic.

Worse, the real story of reallocation logs and error histories are now being held in vendor only areas, unavailable to drive owners or techs to inspect.

For external drives (inside USB enclosures) there is an extra layer of obfuscation at the USB interface.

The only way to really know when your drive is failing is to notice that it is slowing down. Just like the old days.

Don't count on data recovery professionals to be able to extract your data from a failed drive in the future either due to "encrypted firmware and locked terminal ports".

Andrew

Andrew Smith · April 22nd, 2025, 10:33 PM

This video, timed to start at 1:07:00, has some discussion on the issues the data recovery industry is coming up against and also the lying treacherous acts by the HDD companies themselves that started it.

Edit: You'll have to manually move the play head yourself due to YouTube embed bug or use the above link.

My advice is to always have two physical HDDs of the same content (master and slave etc). It's cheaper than data recovery and has already saved me more than once.

Andrew

April 22nd, 2025, 10:29 PM	#1
Andrew Smith Equal Opportunity Offender Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Brisbane, Australia Posts: 3,095	Your HDDs can be lying to you, even with S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics Guessing we're all off spinning platter HDDs now for day to day work, but a number of us including myself would use them for 'shelf' archival storage of projects. For shelf storage it may not be a great risk as the drives will be low usage but it's still something we should know about. Modern HDDs are lying when it comes to their health stats. Over on the GRC (Gibson Research Corporation, legends of the internet they are) forums, there has been a post about this. Essentially, these hard drives are silently remapping their dud sectors behind the scenes without reporting them to the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring diagnostics until after many failed attempts. It only shows up in SMART when things get dramatic. Worse, the real story of reallocation logs and error histories are now being held in vendor only areas, unavailable to drive owners or techs to inspect. For external drives (inside USB enclosures) there is an extra layer of obfuscation at the USB interface. The only way to really know when your drive is failing is to notice that it is slowing down. Just like the old days. Don't count on data recovery professionals to be able to extract your data from a failed drive in the future either due to "encrypted firmware and locked terminal ports". Andrew

April 22nd, 2025, 10:33 PM	#2
Andrew Smith Equal Opportunity Offender Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Brisbane, Australia Posts: 3,095	Re: Your HDDs can be lying to you, even with S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics This video, timed to start at 1:07:00, has some discussion on the issues the data recovery industry is coming up against and also the lying treacherous acts by the HDD companies themselves that started it. Edit: You'll have to manually move the play head yourself due to YouTube embed bug or use the above link. Data Recovery FAQ and Industry Trends - YouTube My advice is to always have two physical HDDs of the same content (master and slave etc). It's cheaper than data recovery and has already saved me more than once. Andrew