How are you installing asmedia drivers for intel usb 3? Please explain how you force feed these. This is a intel usb 3 windows 8 problem. Regards
Yes I recommend slow so it will tick you off all the more when it does not work (it should make all the difference in file format and not finding bad sectors). Is your board asus z87? Regards
I have never heard about this HDD Regenerator and I thank you so much for leading me to it. It has already found 3 delays and it's only @ 3%
Oh my... You should backup immediately your data, the one you hopefully can recover, and this HDD to the junk... No, seriously, it's time to replace this HDD... PS: I have the latest build if you like to have it but enable your PM to send the DL
LOL. You can't "fix" a HDD. Whoever is peddling that HDD Regenerator is scamming you. The claims that are made are utter hogwash, especially if you consider that even the way the magnetic bits are stored can vary from different drive models. There is a lot of misinformation in this thread about how bad sectors work. First, how does a drive know that a sector is bad? There aren't any magical sensors in the drive that can detect physical defects. The only thing that the drive has at its disposal is a head that can read the state of the magnetic field underneath it. That's it. This means that the head only sees "1 or 0". It does not see "1 or 0 or unreadable". So the head could be passing over a part of the drive that has been scratched up and badly physically damaged, and it wouldn't know that it's damaged. Thus the only way for a drive to detect an error is through checksums. This is why when you get a read error from a drive, the actual technical name of the error is "CRC failure". When a drive encounters a CRC error, it tries again. And again. If it succeeds, it will keep on going, and you'll notice a slight delay. If, after a number of tries, it still fails, it will give up and consider the sector as potentially bad. In SMART, this means that the Pending sector count is incremented. The sector is now in limbo. Why doesn't the drive just mark it as bad? Because it doesn't know for sure that it's bad. Remember, the only way for the drive to know that it's bad is by looking at the checksum, but a failed checksum doesn't necessarily mean that a sector has gone bad. A checksum could fail if a sector has become damaged and gone bad, OR it could fail because the data stored in that sector was randomly changed. Maybe a stray particle of cosmic radiation hit a bit and flipped it. Maybe there had been a small power surge, which caused a flux in the drive head, resulting in some random bit flips. The drive doesn't know which it is, so that's why it's "Pending". So how would the drive find out? It does so by writing to that sector and verifying what it wrote. If it writes some data, and that data is successfully read back, the drive will say, "hey, that sector wasn't bad after all--it was probably just a random bit flip and not actual damage". In this case, the sector is removed from Pending and goes back to being treated as a normal sector. If, however, it fails a write test, then the drive will know for sure that the sector is bad. In this case, the sector is removed from Pending and is Reallocated (and the corresponding Reallocated number in SMART will be incremented). Either way, the the sector exits the Pending limbo, and the Pending count in SMART will decrease. You see, hard drives have a number of extra unused spare sectors that had been set aside for exactly this purpose--if there's a bad sector, it's removed from duty and replaced by one of the unused spares. As long as your drive has spare sectors available to replace the bad ones, your drive capacity is not reduced (though it's usually a good idea to RMA the drive anyway). The problem with the write test is that the drive doesn't do it automatically. This is because writing to that sector will destroy any data in it. What if that data is extremely important and the user would rather have the drive undergo professional data recovery to scrape together whatever bits can be salvaged? In that case, a write test to determine if the sector is really bad would make that impossible. So the drive instead waits for the user to write to that sector again, at which time it can take that opportunity to test the sector, which is why a lot of times, Pending sectors stay around for a long time because that sector just doesn't get written to. And this is why slow formats can "fix" problems--because it basically performs a write of every single sector on the drive, which lets the drive test these sectors. It doesn't have to be a slow format--any sort of operation that writes data to every sector on the drive would have the same sort of effect. What does this have to do with the file system? NOTHING. All of this is internally handled by the drive's firmware. It's completely opaque to the OS and to the file system and they have no role to play whatsoever. Even when a sector is reallocated, the OS doesn't know this--only the drive's firmware knows that the sector had been remapped to a different sector, and as far as the OS and file system are concerned, nothing had changed. The OS knows that hard drives do something like this, which is why the file system will not "hide" problematic sectors and instead leave that up to the drive's firmware to handle. The file system only hides bad sectors on more primitive media, such as floppy drives. This is also yet another reason why crap like HDD Regenerator is a snake oil scam--how the f*** can a userland program "fix" something that is handled entirely by a drive's firmware?! So yes, slow formats can "fix" problems, by basically write-testing every sector and thus allowing the drive's firmware to resolve any sectors stuck in Pending. That's it. If a sector is actually, truly bad, there is no way to fix that sector (and even if you could, why on earth would you trust your data to that sector?) except by replacing it with a spare, which is something handled internally, silently and opaquely by the drive's firmware.
Well, very interesting and enlightening. Don't you think, then, that a full low level format would go better than a high level slow format?
With modern hard drives, it's enough to zero them. Most don't support true low level format, anyway (from what I know LLF would even destroy them because it wipes the calibration data stored during the manufacturing process). In the good old times, you got a bad sector list along with your HDD and had to enter this list after format. Wasn't fun.
It depends. A full format can take hours but gives you more peace of mind. Personally, I don't like waiting for many hours, so I always use a fast format that just deletes the control structures except when there's a problem that I'm trying to fix. But this is really a matter of personal preference--how patient you are, and how paranoid you are.
Following your approach, I use Minitool Partition Wizard to manage HDDs. It has two options, either fill them with zeros or ones, do you think is a good to zero them with this tool? Or maybe fill them with ones? Some light is needed here.
My best guess is that it doesn't make a difference and that if it did it could vary from model to model.
Usually it doesn't matter. However, there can be 'weak' (unstable) sectors which will be detected by zeroes or ones only. Most safe would be both in succession (e. g. checkerboard test followed by inverse checkerboard). Of course that means writing two times and doubles the time needed. Almost impossible with the largest mechanical drives. Programs I know for advanced low level testing are HDAT2, MHDD, VICTORIA.
I have a asus rog also z87, desktop, of course (Maximus hero vi), good luck fixing your usb 3 problems without a fix from asus and/or intel. Something's can't be tweaked fixed, I suggest this is one of them. Have no idea why intel pooped on windows 8, but they have. Regards
Wow, just saw this on the ASUS forums, maybe I need to uninstall the ASUS USB Charger crap if I still had this slow USB speed after I did the formatting of my HDD:
Windows 7 you're right, but remember, until recently, the issue also started with 7, so maybe it's not 8 that was bad with USB 3.0 drives after all, give me 48 hours and ill be back on 8 and report back with the numbers
Guess I lost track and your OP was pretty clear that win 7 is not the problem. We will wait for your 2 day test since this is the last problem I have with my new rig and windows 8. Don't format your drive too much bad sectors are rare and not like 10 years ago. They have moving parts .... no sense burning out your drive formatting it as you just saw after 6.5 hours. Regards