At 10:47 AM -0700 3/25/2009, Al Poulin wrote: >On Mar 25, 12:51 pm, Dan <dantear...@gmail.com> wrote: > > At 9:17 AM -0700 3/25/2009, Al Poulin wrote: > > >Bad sectors (blocks) get mapped out on the fly during normal >> >read/write operations. > > Correct. > >So, unlike the advice of 5 -10 years ago
Drives were very different back then. The controllers were much less intelligent, so the work was done up in the OS (driver and other layers). And today's media is supposed to last longer and have better data retention. \\although this is belied by the manufacturers' posting absurdly high MTBF numbers then cutting their warranty periods from 5 to 3 or even 1 year. You'd think if the drives were really better, they'd be willing to stand behind them - at least as a marketing thing.\\ heh. YMMV. Trust No One. >, we no longer need to map out bad blocks in an entire hard drive >every two or three years just to >reduce risk of problems. Depends on a lot of factors... Entropy and Murphy guarantee that all media degrades. If you don't access a particular piece of data, then nothing will trigger the bad block replacement mechanism. That means you could have bad blocks - and corrupted data - sitting around, and not even know it. Personally, I still like fully exercise my HDs every few years. I use a major OS upgrade as the "excuse" to zero the drive and reload it. Just a quick clone backup, zero, clone restore... - Dan. -- - Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to g3-5-list-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
