Common questions about usage, safety, and features.
These alerts indicate that your drive's health is deteriorating. "Caution" typically points to unstable sectors or other pre-failure signs, while "Bad" suggests that critical thresholds have been exceeded and drive failure may be imminent. You should back up your data immediately and consider replacing the drive.
Certain older Maxtor hard drives have a firmware limitation where the internal timer resets after approximately 1,092 hours (65,535 minutes). As a result, the reported "Power On Hours" may loop and appear lower than the actual usage time.
The standard field for reporting buffer size in ATA drives only supports values up to 32 MB. For modern drives with larger caches, this field is often obsolete or left blank by manufacturers, leading to an "Unknown" status in the software.
The "Rotation Rate" reporting standard was introduced with the ATA8-ACS specification. Many older drives and some newer SSDs do not implement this reporting feature, so CrystalDiskInfo cannot retrieve or display this specific metric.
This usually happens if your drives are connected via an unsupported controller. CrystalDiskInfo primarily supports internal SATA/IDE drives and many USB drives. However, drives in RAID arrays or connected through certain external RAID controllers may not be visible.
These specific Samsung models have a known firmware bug that can cause data loss when S.M.A.R.T. data is accessed. To protect your data, CrystalDiskInfo automatically blocks access to these drives by default. You should apply the manufacturer's firmware patch to resolve this issue.
If your external drive isn't detected, it might need a different communication method. Try going to "Function > Advanced Features > USB/IEEE 1394" in the menu and selecting a different setting. This can often resolve compatibility issues with specific USB enclosures.