Hello, > I don't know if anyone brought this up, and I hate to state the > obvious, but if you're getting bad blocks then the hard drive has > exhausted its ability to deal with them on its own and should be > replaced. Otherwise you'll see data loss/corruption and a higher > probability of a total drive failure.
not always, bad sectors get only reasigned if either the sector containing data can still be read after a few tries eg. the drive notices when reading that this part is going bad or when you write to the sector. in case you stumble upon a bad sector and just try to read it, nothing will happen. write it and it will get reasigned. with the current drive-capacities and data densities bad sectors are kind of "unavoidable" in consumer grade drives. that's why it is recommended to read scan your raid of cheap drives often, so the drives have a chance to discover sectors going bad when they are still readable. currently we just take drives with some bad sectors out of the raid, write check them, see if they are gone, mark them and use them again. if it happens again after that they go out for warranty. of course not for really important data, there it's SAS or fresh drives. ;) -sm
