Is my Harddrive failing?

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

On Sat, 2009-10-31 at 12:24 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-10-31 at 11:39 +0000, Alan Cox wrote: 
> > > Oct 31 08:05:04 merk kernel:         res 41/40:00:af:3a:d7/30:00:1e:00:00/00 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
> > > Oct 31 08:05:04 merk kernel: ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
> > > Oct 31 08:05:04 merk kernel: ata1.00: error: { UNC }
> > 
> > That is the drive reporting a bad block yes. Whether it is a one off
> > failure or the start of a pattern of fails ending in doom is
> > unfortunately rather harder to tell.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.

I have a 1 Tbyte drive which has been reporting exactly 1 bad sector for
at least the last 6 months.  It always shows up on the gnome panel as
the drive troubles applet (no name -- it doesn't identify itself), and
every few days I check it.  Always exactly 1 bad sector.

I ought to fix it so as to report only increases in the number of bad
sectors, but I probably never will.

jon