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
