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Ok, to put it simple I have a 2 Tb drive that Linux is saying is failing, the reason for this is Relocated Secotor Count, should i really worry and why is it happening to such a new drive its only 4 months old I received it on December 30th I woudl think it would not be bad at this point. As well I have attached a Screen shot for you guys to see as well..
Last edited by animeman; 04-11-2011 at 09:32 AM.
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At first, please use proper punctuation, reading your post is nearly impossible.
Second, the age of the drive is irrelevant. Of course older drives are more likely to malfunction than newer, but new ones can also fail. I would test the disk with the manufacturers diagnosis tool and make use of the drives warranty if it is failing.
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Well, I'd start getting whatever I value on that drive off to some other drive or media or on-line or whatever you have available (don't bother with the operating system, that will restore with a reinstallatio, just get your stuff).
Over time, it's been my experience that as capacity has grown the long-term life has declined, sort of an inverse Moore's Law if you will. That was true for me when we went from 50M drives to 96M drives to 140M drives and thence to the multi-gigabyte drives and, it seems, into multi-terabyte drives now. I've had a brand-new 150G drive fail in two months -- and the dang warranty replacement drive fail three months later! -- and I've learned that RAID is a Good Thing as is a second drive to back up what I value (plus a stack of DVDs).
I'd get my stuff off quick like a bunny, start yelling at the vendor for a replacement, think about RAID and cross my toes. Then I'd try running fsck and maybe a couple of other disk utilities and maybe try reformatting it and see what happens; chances are, though, that it's about to be toast, sorry.
Well, I'd start getting whatever I value on that drive off to some other drive or media or on-line or whatever you have available (don't bother with the operating system, that will restore with a reinstallatio, just get your stuff).
Good advice, I should have mentioned that, too.
Quote:
Then I'd try running fsck and maybe a couple of other disk utilities and maybe try reformatting it and see what happens; chances are, though, that it's about to be toast, sorry.
Re-allocated sectors are at hardware-level. Neither fsck, reformatting or other tools will change that, since they all work at filesystem-level. Some diagnosis tools from the manufacturers try to repair something like that, but with this amount of failing sectors I wouldn't thing that that helps.
I had an old disk drive that worked fine for years that began to show errors. I reformatted the entire disk with bad block checking. It has worked well ever since then. That was about a year ago.
I had an old disk drive that worked fine for years that began to show errors. I reformatted the entire disk with bad block checking. It has worked well ever since then. That was about a year ago.
OK, maybe that worked for you (I would think that is rather seldom), but do you really trust this drive? Would you use it in a production environment, may be even with important data? I don't think so.
Since this drive is only 4 months old, it is clearly a case for the warranty.
OK, maybe that worked for you (I would think that is rather seldom), but do you really trust this drive? Would you use it in a production environment, may be even with important data? I don't think so.
Is your question relevant to the original poster? Who knows? I was just saying that it is worth trying. No harm done.
WD EARS drive, so its using 4k sectors that are reported as 512b sectors.
If you didnt use the right partitioning tools or process you probably have an 'unaligned' sectors. If that would lead to a higher reallocated sector count I really cant say for sure, but its possible.
Last edited by cascade9; 04-13-2011 at 10:30 AM.
Reason: typo.
I have 2 drives with bad sectors on each but they've been running just fine. I personally haven't used the manufactures tools to see waht is going on. So it may not be nothing to worry about but... Since you have warranty I would use it and if you continue to use the drive make sure you make daily backups. Bad sectors is pretty much pre failure. So I would move to repace them. I plan to replace mine when I get my raid card. Good luck
Is your question relevant to the original poster? Who knows? I was just saying that it is worth trying. No harm done.
I am not sure if this is irrelevant to the OP. If formatting with a check for bad sectors work (at first), the OP could feel a safety that his drive is working, but this safety may be simple not there. Especially with a drive in this size, it can be a longer time until the first new bad sector occurs, and that can lead to data loss. I would call that harm.
I simply see no point in such a work around (and that is it in my opinion) with a drive so new, replace it, it has warranty.
I reckon for a disk of this capacity, a threshold of 140 sectors is too low.
Backup your data by all means but I'd be inclined to keep using the "suspect" disk and periodically check the re-vectored sector count. You may have had a minor head crash but it's not the ammount of sectors, it's the rate of attrition that's important. Drives are built with spare cyclinders to hold the bad block data but you'd need to know the disk's geometry to see how much space you'd have; blocks per sector, sectors per track, platters, etc... I think there is usually a manufacturer's bad block file as well as they can't build perfect disks, this file makes the system see it as perfect when in point of fact it isn't.
Was your system having problems before you got the SMART data or did you just check out of curiosity?
Periodic backup and monitor I'd reckon, if the count doesn't increase over the next month or so, you should be ok. Disks are made to automatically handle bad sectors. (Threshold of 140? where did that come from?? )
I deal with multiple failed drives every week and most of the time when they get one or two bad sectors more will follow. When the sector count has been exceeded it matters more where the bad sectors land on the surface of the drive than how many bad sectors there are. I find most bad sectors form near the beginning of the drive and generally damage the boot sector or operating system files (my shop deals with mostly M$ Windows). The worst I have seen was a pretty nasty head crash that wiped across a woman's laptop drive and left all her pictures and documents destroyed (however it booted to windows without issues and you wouldn't guess it had a bad drive).
I hope you get this resolved with no loss of data and as little down time as possible.
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@animeman, I've had drives fail as soon as they come out the wrapper. Last one was a 1TB WD. I'd be checking the disc with WD tools as already suggested. I'd also be taking note of Cascade's and Soadyheid's posts
Quote:
Originally Posted by TobiSGD
At first, please use proper punctuation, reading your post is nearly impossible.
Sorry, but his writing style is ok and is readable. The fact you answered him shows this to be true even for you. It seems to me that there are a few people in LQ who think they are experts in English but unfortunately they are not.
I reckon for a disk of this capacity, a threshold of 140 sectors is too low.
Backup your data by all means but I'd be inclined to keep using the "suspect" disk and periodically check the re-vectored sector count. You may have had a minor head crash but it's not the ammount of sectors, it's the rate of attrition that's important. Drives are built with spare cyclinders to hold the bad block data but you'd need to know the disk's geometry to see how much space you'd have; blocks per sector, sectors per track, platters, etc... I think there is usually a manufacturer's bad block file as well as they can't build perfect disks, this file makes the system see it as perfect when in point of fact it isn't.
Was your system having problems before you got the SMART data or did you just check out of curiosity?
Periodic backup and monitor I'd reckon, if the count doesn't increase over the next month or so, you should be ok. Disks are made to automatically handle bad sectors. (Threshold of 140? where did that come from?? )
My
Play Bonny!
Im still not having any problems its just it popped up all of a sudden and I was hoping for some info.
Sorry, but his writing style is ok and is readable. The fact you answered him shows this to be true even for you. It seems to me that there are a few people in LQ who think they are experts in English but unfortunately they are not.
I am in no way an english expert, but please tell me where the proper punctuation is in the following sentence:
Quote:
Ok, to put it simple I have a 2 Tb drive that Linux is saying is failing, the reason for this is Relocated Secotor Count, should i really worry and why is it happening to such a new drive its only 4 months old I received it on December 30th I woudl think it would not be bad at this point.
This is, in my eyes, a mix of at least 3, if not 4, sentences without proper punctuation.
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