And if it pertains to my computer, even more so. Get it out of the way and on to the good stuff. Which do you want first?” what do you say? For me, I am a “bad news first” kind of person. When someone says to you, “I have good news and bad news. Here’s how to get that alert nice and early. If your hard drive starts to show signs of failure, you want to know that as soon as possible. When I ran this test it said 'Test completed successfully / Pass' - which should be a good thing.

So this test really only fixes the sector that those files are on, or it doesn't allow anymore data to be written to that sector? Like if it's an excel sheet, notepad document or movie etc., copied to a bad sector, then those files wouldn't open or there'd be issues with them if they did open. I'd think that if I did write data to part of a hard drive that had a damaged sector, that data is useless anyway. So is this a data-destructive test? Can it wipe out parts of my HDD that has data on it? ' EXTENDED TEST - Performs a Full Media Scan to detect bad sectors and attempt to repair them, or mark the damaged sector to not be written to.' So I performed an EXTENDED TEST via Western Digital Data Lifeguard. Apologies if I've asked already, I'm barely awake. Hmmm, so I have one real important question that hopefully someone here can answer. Some will also periodically scan the drive to see if its healthy (in addition to reading the smart data,) or if they are having issues, a scan will help to determin if its a bad drive or if it could be software(windows) issues. A surface scan is usually done before putting any data on the drive because if a bad sector is found, the drive can be replaced without worrying about lost data and if the drive is new, it can be replaced under warranty.

A surface scan will scan the entire disk for bad sectors and attempt to replace them. If you see anything else like amber icons, then it time to replace the drive or at least remove any data off the drive you need. X number of Z errors is ok but X+1 is a faulty/dying drive.) Basically with the smart info you will see good or green icons. If you dont care about the data going on the drive (scratch/cache/temp drive/you have backups) then reading the smart info (crystal disk) is adequate (pre defined values ie. Click to expand.TLDR Its best to do a scan at least once especially if the drive is new.

Crystaldiskinfo check both drives