Defraggler Health Status: Warning

[iflytoohigh]

Hello!

My PC of roughly five years is suddenly displaying "Warning" in yellow beside the health status indicator in Defraggler. I'd say that I defrag my PC about two times a month, and when I last did this, it was green. I'm not sure what could have happened between now and two or so weeks ago that would have changed the status of my computer... but then again, I don't know too much about these things.

I am attaching a screenshot of the Drive and Health tabs, respectively. Nothing is highlighted in red, so I'm not sure what could be triggering this. Also worthy of note, I ran the "Check Drive for Errors" option, and the results indicated that "no major problems were detected". Hmmm. Out of curiosity, am I defragging too much (and could this be affecting the health of the disk)? Should I not be defragging the full hard drive (and instead only be selecting the individual files in need of it)? Any and all insight/advice is appreciated.

Thanks so much!

[mta]

I wouldn't worry too much about the SMART figures.

at best , it's a reminder you should be doing regular backups.
at worst, it means your drive is heading south.

the thing with SMART values is the standard is hardly adhered to, so one manufacture may consider the event 196 (reallocation event count) as bad if above 10 where as another may not care until above 50. (just as an example)

I've had drives run for literally years after SMART indicated a change in the figures without any ill-effect - until the drive did up and die. 

as well as your backups, for extra piece of mind, start an elevated command prompt and type sfc /scannow and hit Enter.
when done type chkdsk c: /r and hit Enter.
respectively, that will check for system corruption and drive errors.

[iflytoohigh]

29 minutes ago, mta said:

I wouldn't worry too much about the SMART figures.

at best , it's a reminder you should be doing regular backups.
at worst, it means your drive is heading south.

the thing with SMART values is the standard is hardly adhered to, so one manufacture may consider the event 196 (reallocation event count) as bad if above 10 where as another may not care until above 50. (just as an example)

I've had drives run for literally years after SMART indicated a change in the figures without any ill-effect - until the drive did up and die. 

as well as your backups, for extra piece of mind, start an elevated command prompt and type sfc /scannow and hit Enter.
when done type chkdsk c: /r and hit Enter.
respectively, that will check for system corruption and drive errors.

Hi, there!

Thank you for such a prompt and useful response! I was sweating bullets a little bit when I saw the warning, thinking that my drive's demise was nigh. Maybe just a little dramatic of a response on my part, haha.

Anyhow, I will certainly be mindful of backing up important files moving forward, and I'll be sure to run those two apps via command prompt as recommended.

Thank you, again! I hope you're having a terrific day.

[Willy2]

- My personal opinion is that one should be very careful with doing a full defrag. It will increase the wear and tear on your HD. On top of that Windows is also set to defrag every once and a while.

- I only regularly defrag fragmented files in a few selected folders and have disabled the Windows Defrag.

- Some of the SMART values of your HD are no longer at zero. E.g. #5 (Reallocation count) is no longer at zero.  And "Spin-Up"  time is also (too ?)  high. Check this out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T

 

[iflytoohigh]

On 7/18/2018 at 18:46, Willy2 said:

- My personal opinion is that one should be very careful with doing a full defrag. It will increase the wear and tear on your HD. On top of that Windows is also set to defrag every once and a while.

- I only regularly defrag fragmented files in a few selected folders and have disabled the Windows Defrag.

- Some of the SMART values of your HD are no longer at zero. E.g. #5 (Reallocation count) is no longer at zero.  And "Spin-Up"  time is also (too ?)  high. Check this out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T

 

Thanks so much for your thoughts and advice! Interestingly enough, I decided to run both the "scannow" and "chkdsk" processes, as was suggested by mta. Scannow successfully ran and uncovered zero issues. Chkdsk said it required a reboot before it could execute, so I allowed it to do so. Unfortunately, it got stuck at 10% for about four hours, so I did a hard reset. When my PC tried to restart, it gave me a BSOD. I let it restart on its own, and it gave another BSOD. I didn't want to let it crash a third time, so I did another hard reset in hopes of breaking the loop. This time when it booted back up, it gave me a message saying that there was an error, and that Windows 10 would need to repair something. I let it run its course, which took about 1 hour. It automatically restarted after this, and it booted successfully with no BSODs or issues. I immediately re-ran "chkdsk" via Command Prompt. It didn't give me the original message regarding it requiring a restart to execute, so it ran its course and did not uncover any problems. Following that, I updated Defraggler to the newest version. When I opened it up... the warning message was gone, and it now displays "Good" in green, as it had before. Isn't that strange?

Anyhow, I share all of this for some closure for anyone who was curious what the outcome of this entire debacle was. Everything seems to now be fine, and even as of this morning Defraggler is still showing my HD health as being "Good" in green, so I don't know if the outdated version of Defraggler was the cause of concern or if there was something that genuinely needed to be repaired (or if the repair only came about because the chkdsk process had frozen and been cut off too early)... ahhhh, there's just no way to know.

I will be mindful of not defragging my entire PC moving forward, just in case this habit was somehow tied into the whole situation. If anything, I'll analyze my disk and try to only defrag selected files that are excessively fragmented.

Thanks for all of the advice, everyone! I'll be sure to keep this thread posted/updated if the "Warning" message returns.

Edited July 20, 2018 by iflytoohigh
Edited to add screenshot of HD health status now displaying "Good".

[Willy2]

- Post another screen shot. I am curious whether something has changed.

[iflytoohigh]

1 minute ago, Willy2 said:

- Post another screen shot. I am curious whether something has changed.

I just updated my post with a screenshot! Let me know your thoughts.

[Willy2]

- Your HD had a few "bad spots" and was somehow able to repair those "bad spots" because the value(s) of (at least) 2 SMART attributes are now higher. (#5 & 196). I assume that the HD was somehow able to "repair" those bad sectors and Windows also was able to "repair" itself.

- SMART attributes #197 & 198 (2 notorious ones) are still at zero meaning that the HD was able to "repair" itself otherwise those 2 values would have been higher than zero.

- I would recommend to make sure that you regularly back up your system especially after this "Warning". And keep looking at your HD with a healthy amount of caution.

[iflytoohigh]

Hello! My apologies for reviving a three month old thread, but I wanted to report back for future readers and share that my hard drive did abruptly die this morning (three months after getting those initial warnings). I'm glad I made a backup image of the hard drive a month ago; it's important to pay attention to those readings, it seems.

[mta]

thank goodness for someone actually doing backups.
amazingly, it's an all-too-often forgotten task.