Problem with Data Lifeguard 1.24?

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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Data Lifeguard 1.24 marks a brand new WD 50000LPVX (2.5" notebook drive) as having failed the SMART test. When I try to see what failed by hitting the icon to show SMART result, it claims it cannot read the SMART disk information.

This is on Win 7.

It claimed the same on the old WD disk, and that’s why I replaced it. It seems flaky that it would mark the SMART test as a fail yet be unable to read the data.

I have another WD USB external My Book drive attached and it passes it. Also, I can read all the SMART data to see what it failed.

On the old disk, once I had run the Data Lifeguard tests, I got an error message at boot time telling me the drive was failing. The old drive passed both the quick test and the more advanced test but not the SMART test.

I have a hunch there is something buggy in Data Lifeguard 1.24.

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Hello gordo999,

As a recommendation, try contacting WD Support since it might be a direct issue with the drive.

WD contact info:

http://support.wdc.com/contact/contact.asp?lang=en

1 Like
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Help4All wrote:

As a recommendation, try contacting WD Support since it might be a direct issue with the drive.

 

Thanks for tip. I waited till I heard back from them before replying. One of the biggest problems we have with companies like WD these days is them farming out tech support to Third World countries where so-called technicians read from scripts.

The tech support person advised me to check for power problems and cable problems. Obviously, the person has no idea what he is talking about.

Meantime, I came up with some independent diagnostic that show the SMART information on the drive. One of them read the SMART data and declared the drive healthy. Another, MHDD diagnostics, an excellent freeware app that does low level disk diagnostics, read the SMART data as well and listed all of the data.

Here is the data it returned:

1…read error rate…200…200…0
3…spin up time…155…151…1241
4…number of spin up times…100…100…203
5…reallocated sectors count…200…200…0
7…seek error rate…200…200…0
9…power on time…100…100…43
10…spin-up retries…100…100…0
11…Calibration retries…100…253…0
12…start/stop count…100…100…22
191…unknown…99…91…1
192…power-off restart count…200…200…10
193…load/unload cycle count…200…200…745
194…HDA temperature…99…93…44
196…reallocate event count…200…200…0
197…current pending sectors…200…200…0
198…offline scan UNC sectors…100…253…0
199…ultra ATA CRC error rate…200…200…0
200…write error rate…100…253…0

That leaves no doubt that Data Lifeguard cannot even read the SMART data on its own drive. It cannot read the data because it can’t even find the SMART table.

There could be valid reasons for that. It may have something to do with the SATA configuration on my laptop (eMachines e625). However, I have no confidence that WD tech support will have a solution after the nonsense they sent me regarding what the problem might be.

I have been an electronics/computer tech for decades and I know the advice they gave me is wrong. On the PATA systems, where there are many parallel data lines, it might be possible for a cable to cause issues but not on a SATA cable with data transmitted serially. It would either work or ir would not work, or it would be intermittent.

I have no such problems, the drive is stable with no data errors. The problem is with Data Lifeguard being unable to detect the SMART table and WD needs to acknowledge that and fix it.