[arch-general] [OT]Disk showing too many bad sectors - is it going to fail ?

[David C. Rankin]

On 10/16/2010 02:46 AM, Partha Chowdhury wrote:
> I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 family harddisk of 160gb capacity
> which is more than 3 years old. recently I installed gsmartcontrol and
> after running it, it showed number of current pending sector count and
> offline uncorrectable sectors as -- 4294967295.Fearing the disk going
> bad, i backed up data and started monitoring it. This is the latest
> gsmartcontrol shows - 
> http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/5707/201010161300051280x1024.png
> 
> After two weeks, the no. of bad sectors is the same and the disk shows
> no sign of failure (at the least there is no problem to read or write
> files from or to the disk).hence I am confused .is the disk going bad ?
> if it is fine why can't it remap all those bad sectors ?
> 

I have found the smart reporting of seagate barracuda drives to be flaky at
best. (but I always back up and monitor as well) I have 4 spinning in 2 dmraid
arrays on a backup server, and sometimes it just throws errors. (it has done
that for years) Drive info is:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 family
Device Model:     ST3750330AS
Serial Number:    5QK0Q09G
Firmware Version: SD1A
User Capacity:    750,156,374,016 bytes
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   8
ATA Standard is:  ATA-8-ACS revision 4
Local Time is:    Sat Oct 16 11:59:51 2010 CDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

There have been a number of firmware changes/updates for seagate drives over the
past 3 years and several "bad runs" of disks. Check the seagate support site and
make sure you have the latest firmware for your drive. I have had the bad sector
errors - sometimes a true failure, sometimes not. Just backup, monitor and if
you continue to get the errors, drop of $50 on a new 1T drive.


-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
Telephone: (936) 715-9333
Facsimile: (936) 715-9339
www.rankinlawfirm.com