[rescue] Bad Sectors

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 @ 21:14 -0500, Aaron Finley said:

> I have received a number of 100+gb IDE hard drives, in various states
> of operation.
> 
> Some drives are testing with 100 or more bad sectors in the first five
> minutes of a scan, so I am tossing them out.
> 
> Other drives may have one or two over the entire range of the scan (up
> to 200 GB).
> 
> How many bad sectors is bad? Are *any* bad sectors found with a scan
> justification for throwing out a drive? 

What does SMART say about the drive condition?  

New drives (for many years now) automatically remap bad sectors, so if
you are getting bad sector reads on a drive, it means the drive has run
out of remapping space, or has some kind of serious malfunction.

Personally, I'd throw the drive out.  On modern drives, running out of
remapping space is usually an indication that the drive is having
trouble.

What I've read is that quality drives go for most of their lifetime
without remapping at all, or only rarely. Then near the end of their
life they start remapping frequently as the drive begins to fail.

> I understand that most drives
> ship with bad sectors which have been remapped, 

It depends.  On drives where I can read the remapping data, I find most
of them ship with no defects at all.

Contrast this with the late 80s and early 90s when drives always came
with a printout of the bad sector list, and didn't auto-remap for you.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Work for something because it is good, not
just because it stands a chance to succeed." -- Vaclav Havel]