Is badsectors good or critical?

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Freak1

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 9, 2009
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Hi.

I been using CrystalDiskInfo for finding out the condition of my drives.

But on 1 drive it can report Good with 200+ bad sectors on other drives its bad with 34, i don't get it.

caution.png


Good.png


good%202.png


Caution%202.png
 
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Where do you see 34? I see 1 drive with 1 reallocated sector, and 1 drive with no reallocated sectors.
 
Is it not 05 reallocated sector count? One is 100 and one is 253, i have more disks i just showed 2 here.
 
That's what reallocated means... it reallocates to reserve sectors.
Harddrives mark them as bad in firmware, and stop writing data to them. I wouldn't worry about it.

80GB? That's not even worth the physical space it takes up and heat it generates. Dump it =P
 
Freak1 said:
Is it not 05 reallocated sector count? One is 100 and one is 253, i have more disks i just showed 2 here.
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Count of reallocated sectors. When the hard drive finds a read/write/verification error, it marks that sector as "reallocated" and transfers data to a special reserved area (spare area). This process is also known as remapping, and reallocated sectors are called "remaps". The raw value normally represents a count of the bad sectors that have been found and remapped. Thus, the higher the attribute value, the more sectors the drive has had to reallocate. This allows a drive with bad sectors to continue operation, however, a drive which has had any reallocations at all is significantly more likely fail in the near future.[12] While primarily used as a metric of the life-expectancy of the drive, this number also affects performance. As the count of reallocated sectors increases, the read/write speed tends to become worse because the drive head is forced to seek to the reserved area whenever a remap is accessed. A workaround which will preserve drive speed at the expense of capacity is to create a disk partition over the region which contains remaps and instruct the operating system to not use that partition.
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http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/manual-en/SmartInfo.html
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis,_and_Reporting_Technology

Again, Jeroen and I see one drive with 1 bad, and one drive with no bad.
 
So its only the raw value i should use? What are the other values for?
 
There were a few sreenshots missing when I posted. That is why I could not find any reference to 34. It seems to be 38 now. Do backup that drive (the one with 38 realocated sectors) SOON!

Personally, I no longer trust a drive with sectors that have been realocated. That having said...

Yes, for the reallocated sector count you may interpret the RAW value. The drives that say "Good" have 0 realocated sectors. The ones that are marked "Caution" have had sectors realocated.
Do note that you cannot always interpret the RAW values freely. Sometimes they only make sense to the drive manufacturer! But with this specific SMART-value you can interpret them as I said:
Any number different from 0 means the drive has found a bad sector which has been realocated to a spare sector.

I don't know by heart how to interpret the other numbers. However, a quick google should turn up that information.

edit: so I'm basically saying the same as Menelmarar's quote.
 
The raw values is the number of re-allocated sectors. The other values are smart thresholds that it uses to detect if the drive is (or was failing).

Basically your drive is not considered smart failed unless the current value is *below* the threshold value. Thresholds are decided by the manufacturer and don't mean the same thing drive to drive.

Of your four drives only two actually have any bad sectors. One is 1 which I wouldn't worry about and the other is 38 (which I would worry about if it starts getting higher at a normal pace).
 
One is 1 which I wouldn't worry about and the other is 38 (which I would worry about if it starts getting higher at a normal pace).
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I agree. I use nagios to monitor the SMART (among other network params) for over 100 disks at work. I have seen drives stuck at 50 bad sectors for 2+ years and others go from 14 bad sectors to over 2000 in two weeks. The drive with 50 bad sectors still is being used. However I tested and RMA'd the 2000+ bad sector drive. I place the growth of bad sectors to be an important factor.
 
Thank you.

That was the answer i was looking for. From now on i will only look at the raw value. The Raw value is the same for every manufacture right?

The one with 38 is my system disk so i will properly just swap it for a SSD in the near future.

Thanks again for all the quick answers.
 
drescherjm said:
I agree. I use nagios to monitor the SMART (among other network params) for over 100 disks at work. I have seen drives stuck at 50 bad sectors for 2+ years and others go from 14 bad sectors to over 2000 in two weeks. The drive with 50 bad sectors still is being used. However I tested and RMA'd the 2000+ bad sector drive. I place the growth of bad sectors to be an important factor.
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Can you monitor SMART on disks that are on a RAID controller with that? I use an Adaptec controller and in that i have to go in to every disk and see the raw value to see bad sectors.
 
Can you monitor SMART on disks that are on a RAID controller with that?
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Most likely not. Usually in this case you need to use their interface because the raw disks are not exposed to the OS. Also nagios runs under *nix and has a more limited functionality in windows. I use it mainly to monitor my linux servers, although I do have a few tests for windows machines but mainly that is to see if they are up.

http://www.nagios.org/

BTW, I monitor more than just bad sectors for drives.

I also look at Current_Pending_Sector, Offline_Uncorrectable, UDMA_CRC_Error_Count, and Hardware_ECC_Recovered

Here is a script in linux that looks at all your mdraid members (assuming they are all in /dev/sd?) and posts the SMART raw data for these parameters.
https://github.com/drescherjm/jmdgentoooverlay/raw/master/Other/shell-scripts/examine_mdraid.sh
 
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Freak1 said:
Thank you.

That was the answer i was looking for. From now on i will only look at the raw value. The Raw value is the same for every manufacture right?.
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Seagate encodes some of their raw values in the SMART however id # 05 is not one that I have ever seen encoded.
 
Is there an application that can run in the background and notify the user when the number of re-allocated sectors changes? Nagios seems like an enterprise solution, overkill for one or two PC's?
 
Nagios seems like an enterprise solution, overkill for one or two PC's?
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I agree. I do not know of any easy automatic method for only a handfull of machines.
 
Dunno what you mean by 'enterprise solution'. I run icinga (a fork of nagios) on a ubuntu server, monitoring 3 servers. Easy to set up.
 
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