[TriLUG] Dieing hard drive?

[Joseph Mack]

"Lance A. Brown" wrote:

> How many sectors should generate read failures during a long selftest?
> I'm up past 25 and counting at this point.  I'm following the BadBlock
> Howto to get them out of the way in the hopes the drive will settle down
> and be good for a while.
> 
> Every time I re-run the selftest it just coughs up another read failure
> on a new sector.

I believe on modern (any time in the last 10yrs) drives, bad blocks are hidden
from you by the firmware, which rotates an unused spare block in instead
of the badblock. By the time you see a bad block, the disk
has run out of spare blocks.

Joe
 
-- 
Joseph Mack PhD, High Performance Computing & Scientific Visualization
LMIT, Supporting the EPA Research Triangle Park, NC 919-541-0007
Federal Contact - John B. Smith 919-541-1087 - smith.johnb at epa.gov