On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 12:44 AM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > What if I copied data to the drive until it was just about full. I'm > thinking like maybe 90 or 95% or so. If I do that and run the test > every few days, would it then catch a error after a few weeks or so of > testing? I realize no one knows with 100% certainty...
As you already said, nobody knows with 100% certainty. In the failures I've experienced I'd expect it to start catching errors within a few days. However, on those drives the relocated sector count never increases, which suggests that the firmware never relocated those sectors when overwritten, which seems brain-dead to me. If the drive relocates the sectors, then conceivably it could go quite a long time until having errors, probably in an entirely different set of sectors. Even if it doesn't relocate, the reliability of the bad sectors could be high or low. Rich
