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Checking for bad sectors

S

SemiLucid

n00b
Joined
Dec 20, 2011
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Hi guys and gals, this probably sounds a little OCD but how often do you check your drives for bad sectors and other faults? What is considered best practice in this regard?

I know allot of people will dismiss this and say rely on good backups, but like I said I am a bit OCD and concerned about data integrity.

Do you rely on the manufacturers diagnostic software or something else? Is there any HDD monitoring software you would recommend for Linux?
 
I primarily look at the SMART raw data. Basically all drives keep a record of how often they operates outside of specifications. On windows a program like CrystalDiskInfo will display this data and tell you if the drive thinks it is operating abnormally. Now to check for bad sectors I use a program called badblocks on linux, on windows HDTune will do. I almost always do this on drives that do not have data on them so this is a first step on every dive I get.

Do you rely on the manufacturers diagnostic software or something else?
Click to expand...

In the past at work I have found instances where WDC and Seagate software both have called very bad drives good as a result I do not trust these utilities that much. These are mostly just GUIs to the drives bulltin SMART short and SMART long test that can be executed with smartmon tools. When thinking back I must have done the short test for these failures. A SMART long test should have caught the bad drives.
 
^ drescherjm speaks the truth. full scanning when you first buy a drive before trusting any data to it, and using a third party tool rather than relying solely on vendor supplied utilities are sound advice.
 
SMART is not entirely reliable. Sometimes disks crash with no SMART errors, and vice versa.
 
I don't check for bad sectors unless I start getting errors, lockups or freezing. I see a lot of bad drives on systems I repair but my drives tend to last forever.

I usually scan with a boot disk like Drive Fitness Test or SeaTools and use that as a guide to how bad the disk is.
 
Thanks for mentioning badblocks, just gave it a whirl on my Debian Squeeze install. I vaguely remember Googles report on HDD reliability mentioning SMART data was not a wholly reliable indicator of drive health. Though I guess it is of some use.

Does anybody else have a regime of checking their drives at regular intervals for bad sectors and the like? I am totally with you guys on checking a new drive before it goes into my desktop.
 
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SMART is not dependable.

Backups are really the only way to make sure your data stays safe,
My current setup has a external 1T backup, and that is backed up every week to a different Backup harddrive.

Depending on the size of your Critical data, Cloud Storage may be an Option
 
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