[ale] Spinrite, or BIOS, or something drops hdd error rate 5X

[Ron Frazier]

Just thought I'd pass along some interesting results I'm getting while
running Spinrite (as discussed on prior thread "Which large capacity
drives are you having the best luck with?") on a new drive I just
bought.  The utility is doing a very intensive non destructive surface
analysis of the whole drive, using numerous read / write data patterns.

One parameter that the utility keeps track of is the number of read
errors corrected by ECC, assuming the smart system is revealing this
data.  It also keeps track of the error rate, that is, the number of ECC
corrected errors on average per million sectors.  Steve Gibson, the
program's inventor suggests noting this value over different runs of the
utility and watching out for increases, which may indicate deterioration
of the drive.

I'm doing several surface analysis runs to burn in this new drive, as I
also discussed on the other thread.  Now, the interesting part.  I
recorded the error rate numbers at the completion of the first run.  I
have 3 main partitions.  The error rates ( per million sectors) were:

Partition A) 143,239
Partition B) 151,918
Partition C) 147,668

This yields an average error rate among all three of 147,608.

I am currently almost 3 hours into the 2nd surface analysis run of the
utility on Partition A.  The average error rate (which is changing all
the time) is reading 31,710 at the moment.

The only thing which changed between the two runs is that I updated the
BIOS in the machine.  However, I cannot imagine that affecting this type
of test.

Assuming the pattern holds to the completion of the test, it appears
that just running Spinrite and sweeping the disk surface with all those
flux patterns has reduced the error rate by a factor of 4.65 times, thus
making the drive more reliable.

I find this fascinating.  This is the first time I've recorded these
numbers for a brand new disk drive.

Sincerely,

Ron

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Ron Frazier

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