PC-3000 Forum

Do you guys find 'hardware retries' are harder on the drive (more stressful) than reading it using a 'UDMA' option?

No, not exactly. I think your timeouts have a lot more to do with that than the reading mode does. For the initial passes you should have a very low timeout set to quickly skip over damaged areas and read as much good data as possible. Then on subsequent passes increase the timeouts to read more intensively. If you're keeping the setting at the default all the time, you're probably stressing the drive just from that.

PIO (hardware retries) by default has a higher timeout, so that's probably what you're seeing.

For drives with a lot of bad sectors or weak head I change PIO/UDMA timeout from 10000/5000 to 400 on first pass. @DataMedics has a good introduction video about using Data Extractor on a bad HDD

On another tool i have I used to go down as low as 60.... Still ran well...