Reallocate stubborn sectors

[Behemot]

I got a box of supposedly bad hard drives, some of them appear to not be completely wasted incl. a 1TB 2.5" Samsung. There are pretty much screwed sectors there but I can not make that PoS to reallocate them. Now it does not seem there is whole lot of them (about 50), considering the data density; it is so huge for current drives that having 100% good surface is almost impossible these days. Manufacturers know that very well, what can be seen from huge number of sectors it has for reallocation until it is considered failed (old drive had that S.M.A.R.T. value about 100, here there is 252). So I was thinking if I make them reallocate and no more will appear under intensive stress, I can still use it somewhere non-critical, or resell.

However, it just does not reallocate. Usually the thing is able to write into that sector, only the read is than screwed. So all pending sectors are always miracously "healed" and dissappear. I tried Chek Disk, it always froze. HD Tune always wrote over it only to find it bad again during next read check. Hard Disk Sentinel, I think it is "repair drive" test (tried overwriting before, same as HD Tune) is stuck in a loop of reading bad-overwriting good-reading bad again loop for two hours now on the very first bad sector.

Is there anything else I can run to make the bloody damn thing reallocate it, or is it really only good to be run through grinder for aluminium?

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

i have a hitachi deskstar 7k3000 2tb that does the exact same thing as yours. the bad area starts at around the 1.8tb mark. i use victoria to make it reallocate on a bad read but it writes fine. only read is screwed like yours. only way i've found is to roughly figure out where the bad LBAs start then partition that area off as unusable space. i wasted too much time trying to figure out how to get the damn thing to reallocate i just gave up!

[televizora]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

If the bad sectors are concentrated in the upper part of the space of the drive, then use HPA to cut this section and make it inaccessible to user applications.
If the bad sectors are spread across the drive, then use MHDD, find the concentrations of the bad sectors, write the first and last bad sector LBA's of each group of bad sectors, convert LBA's to Gigabytes and use Acronis Disk Director to make such partitions that skip completely the bad sectors by several gigabytes. Don't make partitions on this space - just skip it.
Same if there is only one region with bad sectors..
And know - this drives are unstable for now on. If the S.M.A.R.T did not reallocate the sectors, then there are no more reserve sectors on the drive and the list of the bad sectors is full.

[televizora]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

only way i've found is to roughly figure out where the bad LBAs

Don't figure out, just calculate. 1 LBA = 1 sector. 1 sector = 512bytes.

[Behemot]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

Unfortunatelly it is somewhat scattered. So yeah, for smaller drives, it's good for testing if I cut couple tens of GB and use the rest only for OS. However here that would mean about 1/4 or 200+ GB, that's way too much:

1 Error at 215705 MB (LBA 441765344)
2 Error at 215955 MB (LBA 442277568)
3 Error at 237928 MB (LBA 487276960)
4 Error at 263801 MB (LBA 540266016)
5 Error at 264408 MB (LBA 541508736)
6 Error at 264490 MB (LBA 541677024)
7 Error at 300929 MB (LBA 616303488)
8 Error at 316453 MB (LBA 648097632)
9 Error at 318648 MB (LBA 652591520)
10 Error at 319059 MB (LBA 653434240)
11 Error at 321193 MB (LBA 657804512)
12 Error at 321600 MB (LBA 658638400)
13 Error at 323746 MB (LBA 663033344)
14 Error at 323934 MB (LBA 663418848)
15 Error at 369598 MB (LBA 756937344)
16 Error at 369728 MB (LBA 757204192)
17 Error at 370102 MB (LBA 757970368)
18 Error at 371921 MB (LBA 761695808)
19 Error at 372008 MB (LBA 761874080)
20 Error at 387811 MB (LBA 794238848)
21 Error at 388491 MB (LBA 795629888)
22 Error at 390492 MB (LBA 799729184)
23 Error at 390826 MB (LBA 800413568)
24 Error at 391126 MB (LBA 801026784)
25 Error at 419667 MB (LBA 859478816)

[jiroy]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

I use spin rite for reallocating bad drives , as well as demagnetizing spindles , and erasing long file names and data errors . Bad Sectors doesn't mean necessarily a damaged sector .

In case it is more difficult to re-allocate bad sectors , cut it and convert it with any Partition programs to fat 32 instead of the smaller allocation table NTFS . Working with Fat 32 will make redressing Hard drive status a lot easier .
In the nearly impossible cases , where you cannot allocate or create , it's not bad to use the Fat16 trick temporarily , cause most of the drives initial problems comes from stuffing Datas over Datas .

Once you made some 4.7 GB Fat16 partitions , you can fill it with movies to erase the previous Data .

Such processes in the end will make you define truly the real status of the Drive , and let you make the good decision between using it as storage device or bootable system

[Behemot]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

Da crap stopped working at all, great, after couple days of working with it. I've let it meet the ground closely and fast…

The other one (WD) with only one stubborn sector is currently being check-disked with FAT32 over it, we'll see…

Eh, another one, Toshiba…14800 reallocated sectors, never seen something like that before. And it still does not have FAIL status The number if these 2.5" craps failing is horrible. There are no decent second-hand drives on the market cause they are all dropping like flies!

[Sparkey55]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

You apparently live where the magnetic North and South lines of flux diverge at right angles to each other.

[noppa]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

If LBA errors repeat on a regular pattern you don't have bad sectors
but a bad head and of course all sectors related to this head will result
"BAD" to any of the high level programs that try to relocate them.
For sure spare area for relocating sectors if full and any further relocation
will fail.

chkdsk won't repair sectors, it should be user to repair file system on
a HEALTHY drive (and even on these sometime it does more harm!)

HDTune and other software like these can't do nothing to fix a drive in this
status. Spinrite, HDD Regenerator and other programs that claims to fix "magnetic errors" (!) of course will fail too since they are simply expensive snake oil!

You would need a tool to deal with drive at firmware level an try to disable
the bad head reducing the hard drive size, for the SAMSUNG you can't simply
cut a head but you should BURN IN it instead. but it's not an easy task.

Take a look here, lot of info on how this little beasts work at inner level.


http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1657

BTW
if you want to know why a lot of 2.5'' drives fail take a software like
Victoria for Windows

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/deta...r_windows.html

and look at SMART parameters in particular at attribute #191
and you'll find the answer!

[Behemot]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

Indeed, check disk only changed the status of the WD to pending for reallocation, as usually. Why the heck the explicitelly state the surface test repairs bad sectors of the drive?! HD Sentinel seems to force

Anyway, that being had sounds strange. All the surface works fine just a small part of it does not. These mobile drives always have only single platter also so I don't even understand that about heads, there are two of them, not 6 or 10.

They fail because they are paper crap, the material is too thin to even handle it's own thermal expansion and reduction, let alone any external pressure. It's all crap compared to desktop drives, and they constantly push more and more capacity into it which makes it geometrically worse.

BTW, WD Blue does not even have G-Sense attribute.

Well the conclusion is 90 % of these 2.5" drives I got indeed are frelled. Also gonna try a 1.8" one as long as I bring the mobile SATA adapter (it lacks +3.3 V which is useless shit anyway since the SATA standard was made).

There is a candidate of good 3.5" drive, however I have suspiciously slow throughput from it, only about 14 MB/s though it reports running link at 300 MB/s. Will try to reboot if it helps, sometimes it does. If not I wonder what may be wrong with it? Burst speed is about 150 MB/s. Seek is terrible, 70 ms on average!

[Behemot]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

Damn it how can a drive get screwed in a way it does work normally just having insane slow transfer rate??

[momaka]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

I rarely try to reallocate bad sectors on a drive. Instead, I put my "suspect" HDDs in a test system and use it for a while. If the bad/reallocated/pending sector count keeps increasing or the drive is slow or it drops out under heavy read/write, then the HDD is probably bad and that's when it's time to ditch it (or at least not use it for any system that requires a reliable drive). But if the bad sectors don't increase, I get reasonable read/write speeds, and the HDD never drops out under load, then I just use the drive as is.

I have a crap-ton of HDDs with bad sectors, one of which is the infamous Seagate .10 or .12 series. It has some 740+ bad sectors, and 1300+ pending. In the first year I started to use it, I'd get failed reads and writes quite frequently. Now it has finally "settled". And the bad sector count has barely increased.

The only time I try to partition the bad sectors away is when I for sure have a bad cluster of sectors.

[TechGeek]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

Junk the drive. Samsung drives are rebranded Seagate drives, and those drives are terrible.

momaka: I hope you don't have any important data on that drive.

[momaka]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

Junk the drive. Samsung drives are rebranded Seagate drives, and those drives are terrible.

Not the old Samsung IDE drives. I think those were actually made by Samsung, and they are/were pretty decent.

momaka: I hope you don't have any important data on that drive.

Nothing important indeed. Just a few games, some ISOs, some movies, some pictures (collected from the internet), and stuff like that. Most of the stuff I already have a copy of on at least another HDD. Though there are a few game ISOs that I created recently that I haven't backed up and they are on that drive. I doubt that drive will go now, and if it does... oh well, I got 3 years of service from that drive with the bad sectors (granted it's not 3 yeas 24/7). So I can't complain.

The point is, it doesn't matter if you use good drives or bad drives. As long as you keep backups (the more, the better), the drive you use becomes almost irrelevant. Only from a performance stand point it makes sense not to use a bad drive, as they can really slow down when they hit/go over bad sectors/clusters.

[Behemot]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

May have found the reason for the unprecedented numbers of bad sectors I am getting with all the newer drives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingl...etic_recording

BTW, are there already any real-world experiences with helium filled drives reliability? They will be on the market for almost 2 years soon…

[eccerr0r]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

I worry that these helium filled drives are "planned obsolescence" as chances are, the helium will diffuse/leak out of the drive after many years, and you'll be forced to replace them. Then again I've heard that perpendicular record drives also have a fixed quantity of lubricant that will eventually run out...

[Behemot]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

Been doing some reading about and it seems that the heads of "modern" (post 2010) drives only fly nanometers above the surface. So I am not sure if discussion about the lubricant and other protective layers actually has any sense, its mostly atomic layers anyway

But helium indeed diffuses even throguh metals, much like hydrogen does, so I wonder what the expected lifetime is? As stated, it's almost two years since the first ones were put to use, so I wonder if some have already failed because of this.

[momaka]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

May have found the reason for the unprecedented numbers of bad sectors I am getting with all the newer drives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingl...etic_recording

BTW, are there already any real-world experiences with helium filled drives reliability? They will be on the market for almost 2 years soon…

Lol, the [crazy, stupid] things companies do to increase drive space. When is this non-sense going to stop? When hard drives start lasting less than a month? A week?

Seems like performance and cost are the most important thing nowadays, with reliability almost completely disregarded (or regarded just enough to not upset every end-user).

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

Lol, the [crazy, stupid] things companies do to increase drive space. When is this non-sense going to stop? When hard drives start lasting less than a month? A week?

Seems like performance and cost are the most important thing nowadays, with reliability almost completely disregarded (or regarded just enough to not upset every end-user).

WTF, sounds like even a bunch o' 500 GB HDDs in RAID0 would be more reliable than those!

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Reallocate stubborn sectors

ah well.. they just dont make hard drives like they used to anymore. nuff said... i shall go back to worshipping my wd re4 2tb drives. the last great hard drive i'll ever need...