Re-using a hard drive with a failing sector?

Hello!

I have a NAS with two drives, and have had to upgrade the drives twice so far, because each time there was a drive with a failing sector and I wanted to just buy more storage while I had to buy drives.

Now I have these two drives that are still usable, and two drives that have just one failing sector each.

Can I somehow re-use the latter two in enclosures or in a build with an OS that can handle not using the failing sectors?

Thanks in advance.

One failed sector is the first of many to come. Just be happy you had no lost data and chuck them in the bin. Unless they're still under warranty, then RMA them.


Sure you can play around with them for non-essential stuff. Just know they're basically a ticking bomb now and use them accordingly. One "fun" experiment is to run a low level format on a drive with one failed sector. Then see how many you have after the drive re-checked all the sectors.

when i had a toshiba with a huge chunk of bad sectors, I just encapsulated it within its own partition so that the OS couldn't write or read it.

drive still works fine, now that the bad sectors are being ignored.

In my experience, different brands handle failing sectors differently. Seagate has a reputation for bad reliability and this is one of the many reasons. By the time you detect the first bad sector on a Seagate drive you're probably already looking at serious data loss or mechanical failure. On the other side of the coin, I have a some Western Digital drives, and many Hitachi drives, that have continued working fine with bad sectors for 5-12+ years after they were detected. Some of those have even been working in Raid-0, with two bad sector drives, for 5+ years. No data loss. I think that out of all the drives where I've ever had a bad sector detected, only maybe 15% of those ended up actually failing and causing any data loss, and 90% of those failed drives were Seagate.

My recommendation would be (pretty common sense stuff really):
-Don't use it as an OS drive
-Don't store anything super-important on it, but stuff like movies, music, porn, etc should be more than fine. Anything you could potentially re-download in a worst-case scenario.
-Monitor the drive for new bad sectors. If new bad sectors continue to show up on a regular basis, that is bad. More often than not they don't continue to show up just because a few did.
-Keep an ear out for the click of death, retire drive immediately if you hear it.
-Throw the drive away right now if it's Seagate.