Physical bad sectors cannot be repaired. These tools just force the final remapping by doing a write operation. The remapped sectors are replaced by spare ones and thus look like repaired (remapping is totally transparent to the user and OS due to LBA mapping). Due to the remapping, the performance of the HDD might degrade somewhat, as there is more head movement. There are also weak (pending) sectors, their fate will be decided upon the next Write operation (as above). If the sector is not defective, it will be returned to the pool, thus the "Pending sectors" count can decrease again. If defective, remapping is taking place. The problem is that remapping is very slow, depending on the type of HDD. If it's an Enterprise grade one, remapping times are fairly low, but for some consumer devices, 2 minutes per remapping operation is common. In other words, as soon as the drive starts to remap, the OS basically freezes for extended periods of time. Time to buy a new one, then. Disclaimer: Above was written for spinning rust drives. For SSDs, there is the life curve which you should observe closely. The software coming with an SSD usually announces when it has to be replaced. General disclaimer: Each and every storage device can spontaneously fail at any time. Thus, always backup, b*tches!
SSD is generally used for boot drive (where you install windows) because that drive always keeps running as long as you working. For that purpose 250 Gb SSD is enough. If you install windows, office and several apps and games , it occupies around 50 Gb max , so remaining 200 Gb is free and fills slowly over time. If you don't play modern games which occupies 50 Gb hdd or if you are not a multimedia programmer who compose video / audio every day then you don't need 1 Tb SSD. Just 250 Gb SSD enough. Spend remaining money to buy big internal or external HDD if you want to store movies or some other big files.
Well, I don't play games and I'm not a multimedia programmer and my 750 GB HDD "only" has 440 something GB left. I guess I'll have to buy a new laptop with a SSD of at least 500 GB. Thanks, but isn't it weird HDD Sentinel detected bad sectors and this program didn't or are bad tracks different from bad sectors (and even so, this program didn't detect any)? EDIT: Last year I lost all my documents because my HDD's partition was deleted against my will. Do you know of any program that can recover the files? I tested a lot of these programs soon after losing the files and none of them worked and f I'm not mistaken I think the more time it passes it's even more difficult to recover them. Anyway, I think it's odd I've never been able to recover files deleted from the recycle bin even when running these kind of programs right after having them deleted so it's not weird not being able to recover them from a deleted partition (not to mention when some time has passed). IIRC, most times the deleted files weren't even detected (and if they were, I'd have an error when trying to recover them or/and they'd be damaged).
Get "Sergei Strelec" the windows pre-install environment with all tools you need. Burn it to a USB drive (using Rufus tool) and keep it aside. Then make your hdd 2 or 3 partitions, install windows in first parition and always store your personal files in 2 and 3 partitions but not in first (bootable drive). When you think you deleted files or lost due to crash or virus, just put "Sergei Strelec" in to USB and boot with it. Open Start Menu and choose "Easeus Data Recovery Wizard" from hdd tools menu and select your drive where you need to find deleted or lost files. After it search and ask you to recover , choose an external hdd partition with free space to recover. Done.
Putting everything on one drive sux if that drive should fail.....Even a Crypto virus would hold the entire drive hostage
He said he want one SSD and he already have one external hdd. So i suggested to make hdd 2 or 3 partitions and store files in 2 and 3. Then ext HDD would be there to recover files if something goes bad with hdd. I don't think i am wrong. He can make another USB drive with bootable Kaspersky virus removal tool and use in case of virus. No need to presume he will catch with virus now.
Thanks for answering but regarding files that were simply removed from the recycle bin and not deleted partitions do I have to go through all you said?
Recovery softwares try to recover any lost files namely deleted, file system crash, power loss crash, virus attack. In case of virus attack, you must first run anti virus and then recovery software. Easeus Data Recovery Wizard is the only app worked me to recover my lost files many times. I deleted many files (deleted permanently and not to recycle bin) intentionally and tested the app. It recovered 95% files. Always remember when you want to recover files, you must do it immediately after you lost them. Not after days or months.
I just used EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard after deleteing somes files from the recycle bin and it didn't find them (or at least I didn't search in the right directories). Even if it it I guess they could have different names and so I wouldn't kney they'd be the deleted files, not no menton they could be corrupted. Anyway, this program detected some corrupted folders and RAR files whose name is "ZZ.", "Z.........." and something like that. Why is this?
Though you select only the deleted folder to recover, Easeus app will scan whole partition before it let you recover the folder. For that to happen you must wait for one or two hours to let it scan. I tested again by deleting 70 Mb of random files permanently , Easeus app took 40 minutes to scan and recovered entire deleted folder with full file names intact. Did you stop windows indexing on your partitions ? I am not sure what is wrong at your end. I suggest you to install windows freshly and do not run any hdd utilities on drives which will stop indexing. Set all options in windows to your requirement, install all apps / games you want and then take a backup using acronis true image 2020 ( it is inside Sergei Strelec win PE) into external hdd.
And wouldn't it hold an extra SATA HDD/SSD hostage too? It lets recover the folders/files before finishing the scan but I let it finish, anyway. No, I didn't (at least it says it's indexing the Start Menu and Users locations), but how can that affect this?
Since we talked about SSDs, could someone tell me the difference between a SATA SSD, a M.2 SATA SSD and a M.2 SATA NVMe SSD and what does M.2 mean? Does a M.2 NVMe SSD pay off since it's more expensive than SATA/M.2 SATA ones?