[rescue] Bad Sectors

[Bryan Gurney]

On Sat, 20 Jan 2007 12:20:37 -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix  
<shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:

> Fri, 19 Jan 2007 @ 13:48 -0500, Aaron Finley said:
>
>> On 1/19/07, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
>> > Fri, 19 Jan 2007 @ 01:53 -0500, Aaron Finley said:
>> >
>> > > The rest have been 200s, and three have been bad sector free. I am
>> > > using a disk inspection program that writes zeros to every single  
>> bit,
>> > > and one drive had one bad sector. I am unsure, as per your advice,
>> > > whether I should trash the drive for one bad sector. I will run
>> > > seatools on that drive and see how it turns out.
>> >
>> > A SMART utility should give you some information as well.
>>
>> SMART is saying the drives are happy and passing their self-tests even
>> when they have upwards of 300 bad sectors.
>
> What brand is the drive?
>
> SMART is supposed to track remapping space and other factors.
>
> SMART *is* broken on a lot of cheap drives and older drives though.
>

In particular, I've seen Seagate drives that show a "Seek Error Rate" and  
"Raw Read error rate" value that is very positive, and the raw hex  
register has 6 or 7 hex digits.  My 120 GB 7200.7 (ST3120026A) is doing  
that right now.  On my 73 GB WD Raptor, all of the scary SMART fields are  
reading zero.

Out of (founded) paranoia, I tend to retire a hard drive after two years  
in my gaming system, relegating it to secondary duty.  I even did that for  
my 36 GB Raptor that I bought in January 2004; I retired it at the end of  
2005.  My storage drive was commissioned in May 2005, so its time is up;  
I'm going to replace it with a 3ware 9650 RAID-1'ing two WD RE2 500 GB  
drives.

As for my 12" PowerBook G4 that is going to be 2 years old in October  
2007... I don't know, I guess backups will be enough considering what's on  
it.