Bad sectors on hard drive - bin it?

cyber69 · 12 May 2020 at 08:42

I have a large 14TB hard drive which has some bad sectors (less than 1% on HDTUNE) and it’s outside of it’s warranty as it’s an OEM part. I am thinking it may still be good just to use for archiving data? Just fill it fill of data that will only be written once? Or shall I just bin it?

cyber69 · 12 May 2020 at 09:51

All smart tests pass using WD Diags just has bad sectors.

keenan · 12 May 2020 at 09:59

That depends on how important this data is to you. I would be inclined to use it as a media drive in a NAS or something that stores non crucial rotating data like movies etc. Nothing long term and data that are easily replaceable.

cyber69 · 12 May 2020 at 10:07

Does the drive map out the bad sectors when it detects them? So if writing data to the drive it will only store in known good sectors?

EssexBoy · 12 May 2020 at 10:21

Use Victoria 5.28 to remap or repair the bad sectors.

cyber69 · 12 May 2020 at 12:20

EssexBoy said:
Use Victoria 5.28 to remap or repair the bad sectors.

Looks like what i’m after, selected the remap option and then launched the surface scan. The drive itself is an enterprise SATA and worth £400 so if I can use it then that would be a bonus.

cyber69 · 12 May 2020 at 13:29

Victoria detected the bad sectors but was unable to remap them, I guess all the spare sectors have already been used up. Total amount was 1.7% which on a 14TB drive is quite small.

FreeStream · 12 May 2020 at 14:14

What does the SMART data show?

I’d be putting that drive through a few erase cycles (to give the drive a chance to remap everything) followed by something that tests drive integrity.

If that all passed clean I’d consider using it, otherwise knackered!

cyber69 · 12 May 2020 at 14:32

FreeStream said:
What does the SMART data show?

I’d be putting that drive through a few erase cycles (to give the drive a chance to remap everything) followed by something that tests drive integrity.

If that all passed clean I’d consider using it, otherwise knackered!

Erase cycles on Victoria or something like a killdisk zero pass?

FreeStream · 12 May 2020 at 15:32

Yes anything that writes data to the disk. Preferably zeros then random data.

Then write data to the disk and read it all back to verify it’s integrity.

cyber69 · 13 May 2020 at 17:57

Seems to have done the trick by writing zero’s to the bad sectors and then running victoria again. It now remapped all the bad sectors and I quit the program and ran a scan again and it did not pick up any bad sectors.

I guess the drive may be ok to use again for data archiving purposes as it passes all smart tests. It was originally part of a large raid5/6 and failed due to the bad sectors.

FreeStream · 13 May 2020 at 20:00

I'd put it through at-least three zero cycles before doing Victoria again

Steampunk · 14 May 2020 at 00:33

Bad sectors in themselves aren't a problem. They get remapped (as they are supposed to) to spare blocks. I've got drives in light use/storage that showed bad sectors a couple of years ago and have had none since. The problems are when drives can't remap, or when bad blocks keep appearing over and over. At that point the drive can't be trusted and probably needs binning.

I use Hard Drive Sentinel to keep an eye on the drive wear, and it's pretty good at letting you know if a drive is deteriorating or wearing our before you see smart errors, and will let you force writes and remapping.

R3X · 14 May 2020 at 13:53

Agree with above, hard drive sentinel is excellent its the only one that actually reported bad sectors found on 2 of my hdds recently while oddly the manufacturer hard drive diagnostic tools (WD and Samsung) failed, also hdtune failed also.

hdd sentinel also have a surface scan, so you can do a read test and write test(destructive on your data) and also a disk repair (read test with bad sector repair mode), all built into the app.

I am going to try and see if I can do similar and hopefully my bad sectors get remapped, for now hdd sentinel says I am fine and nothing to worry about though.

cyber69 · 14 May 2020 at 21:17

Hdd sentinel is trialware only and does not let you perform a surface scan without paying. I’m currently running a second zero pass using killdisk and will then do a final victoria scan and if nothing is found will put it into use. It’s certainly a lot better since the first victoria scan which mapped out the 31 bad sectors. The drive used to be part of a raid set doing constant writes (cctv).

fezster · 14 May 2020 at 21:35

I used Victoria to remap 35 odd bad sectors. It seems to have resolved them (another pass did not show any), but the SMART data still shows reallocated sector count as 0??

cyber69 · 15 May 2020 at 12:08

Mine does not show any reallocated sectors either. It just went through a full zero pass wipe ok and Victoria is still not picking up any new errors so I am going to put it into a USB enclosure and dump a load of data onto it for archiving only. If I don’t constantly write data to it then it should be fine for just reading purposes. Saves me around £400 for a 14TB drive also.

Paul_RD · 16 May 2020 at 18:46

cyber69 said:
Total amount was 1.7% which on a 14TB drive is quite small.

1.7% of 14TB = 238GB :eek:

Was 1.7% the number of bad sectors, or the number of spare sectors?

If that was my drive, I would zero erase it as has been suggested above, then use it in a non-critical environment and see if it gets any worse or remains where it is. Then depending on how it behaves over the next few months, you could make a decision to keep it non-critical or move it to more important data storage.