SMART errors - are they for real? or, BIOS weirdness?

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

>>>>> "BW" == Bruno Wolff <bruno at wolff.to> writes:

BW> It might be that the drive firmware has a bug where as the pending
BW> sector count doesn't always get cleared when the sectors are
BW> reallocated. I have a Maxtor drive that has that problem.

I've seen this on Western Digital and Seagate drives as well.

BW> It might also be that you have never written of the bad sectors so
BW> the drive can't reallocate them.

I have used the "wipe drive" functionality in each drive's diagnostic
utilities and used dd to zero the entire drive as well.  The drives
still report problems.

Unfortunately at this point I usually just throw them out, which is
terribly wasteful but I can't trust them for important data and I
can't get the manufacturer to replace them without an actual failure
of their diagnostic tools.

 - J<