Nils Holland wrote: > On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 11:29:53AM -0600, Dale wrote: > >> Well, I have dd'd the thing a few times and ran the tests again, it >> still gives errors. What's odd, they seem to move around. Is there a >> bug crawling around in my drive?? lol >> >> # 1 Extended offline Completed: read failure 40% >> 21500 4032048552 >> >> #12 Extended offline Completed: read failure 40% >> 21406 4032272464 > Well, the location of the first unreadable error is before the > location of the second one, so it's entirely possible that the drive > was eventually able to read the first bad sector and subsequently > remapped it to a sparse sector. Of, depending on what other actions > may have been done to the drive between the two tests shown, a write > may have been done to the sector, which would also result immediately > in a sparse sector being taken if the original sector looks > "suspicious" to the drive. > > All of that should - at least a little bit of it - be visible by > looking at the other smart statictics. The reallocated sector count > would have gone up in such a case, and the number of currently pending > sectors could have gone down. Still, even though the first bad sector > might have been appropriately dealt with, there's obviously more wrong > with the drive, as the second test shows. > > Personally, with the relatively low hard disk prices of recent years, > I've always started distrusting drives as soon as they began showing > bad / remapped sectors and failing self-tests, even though they still > reported their own SMART status as fine. More times than not, just > completely zeroing out a drive will fix the then-known bad sectors, as > it triggers the drive's firmware to remap them, but in my experience a > drive that started developing a few bad sectors will soon develop more > of the same. So at least in environments dealing with important data, > I'd quickly exchange such a drive and probably only continue to use it > for less important stuff, like transferring data from one machine to > another, where the failure of the transpoting drive would be harmless, > as the data could at any time be gotten again from the original > machine carrying it. > > Greetings, > Nils > >
This drive did report issues a while back, year or so I guess, and I got them corrected by dd'ing the drive etc. Anyway, I bought a new drive to replace it but have been using the one here as a backup drive mostly to test and just see what it would do long term. Well, it did last a while at least but as you rightly point out, it started having more issues. At least in this case, once the drive reported errors, it went downhill from there. I was sort of hoping it would work fine like one would expect but I'm not surprised that it is failing again. One thing I have learned about drives over the years, if it ever gets a error, you better replace it, just to be safe if nothing else. Since I already replaced this drive, nothing lost. We did learn something tho. Just because it claims to have fixed itself doesn't mean it will be a long term solution. ;-) Dale :-) :-)
