Damaged Block

[MrHood22]

I was experiencing some slowness with my computer. I thought it was Windows 7 related so I reinstalled it. I'm still have some slowness (not nearly as bad) so I ran HD Tune Pro. I had it test my OS Hard drive and it had one damaged block.

Could this be the cause of the slowness or is one damaged block something that doesn't warrant a replacement drive?

I'm in the process of running Spinrite but it takes crazy long (9 hours = 30% finished).

So as I said above, should I replace the drive or is one block not something to worry about?

 

[djBon2112]

I don't know 100%, but I'm having the same issue on one of my (former) RAID disks... I get an error on one or two sectors, and as soon as I try to do anything to it, it slows to a crawl (like 1.5 MB/s crawl...). I'm planning to RMA the drive when I stop being lazy; perhaps that's your best solution.

 

[loftydan]

In short, yes.

If you have 1 bad block, you may have many pending bad blocks. You should be able to check the SMART data in HD Tune to see how many blocks are pending reallocation. Normally a block goes bad because it cannot be read any longer, but the pending blocks are just blocks that have a hard time being read, thus slowing everything down with retries.

Hopefully that makes sense (I'm still waking up this morning). Also, 1 block is enough to warrant a replacement under warranty (or even out of warranty really).