Is my Harddrive failing?

[Tony Nelson]

On 09-10-31 12:24:00, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
 ...
> It used to be fairly common for new disks to have a few bad
> blocks--back in the dark days of early PCs when disk drive capacities 
> were measured in tens or low hundreds of megabytes.  Then things 
> seemed to improve as manufacturing techniques improved.  When disk 
> capacities were measured in tens or low hundreds of gigabytes, I 
> don't recall ever encountering a new drive with bad blocks.  Now that 
> capacities have reached the terabyte range, it seems that a few bad 
> blocks on new drives are once again less rare.

"Modern" drives from the last decade or more use formatting that 
skips over bad blocks.  There should /never/ be a bad block on a new 
drive.  As blocks will go bad from time to time in otherwise properly 
functioning drives, all "modern" drives have automatic recovery and 
remapping of bad blocks (but only for blocks where the data could be 
recovered or the block was written to).  (That IBM drive fiasco was 
mostly that their recovery process was very noisy and dreadfully slow.)


> It would be nice if the monitor software could record the state of a
> drive and issue reports when the number of bad blocks increases from
> the starting state, rather than insisting that every bad block is a 
> sign of imminent failure.  The persistent false alarm provokes the 
> user to ignore the monitor or turn it off entirely, thus risking 
> missing a warning of an imminent real failure.

Right.  SMART already watches that bad blocks don't increase too much.  
I just let smartd mail me when it thinks the drive is going bad.  Also, 
I turn on Automatic Offline Testing, which scans the disk every few 
hours and may be able to catch a block going bad while it is still 
automatically recoverable and remap it without causing any trouble.

-- 
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