Reallocated Sectors Count: Should I be worried?

[t_ski]

Could be a defect found at the factory and fixed by reallocation

 

[Aquinus]

A long smart test should tell if you if the drive is suitable to still be used or not.

If you start up a Ubuntu LiveCD you could run:

sudo -i
apt-get install smartmontools
smartctl -t long /dev/sda #assuming the first drive is what you're talking about

It could take a while and it runs in the background. I recommend running it over night and checking it with this:

smartctl -a /dev/sda

Once again, I'm assuming the drive is living at /dev/sda and not a higher order drive.

 

[silkstone]

I just lost my HDD to this, basically they are bad sector waiting to be allocated to the "backup"sectors on the disk. Once they have run out, you will be looking at a dead HDD.

Keep your eye on this and the reallocated sector count, if it keeps increasing day in day out you wanna backup and RMA asap.

 

[atikkur]

i once lost my hardisk because of this. it tends to increase the realocated number if you keep using it. and win7 notified me to back up my hdd every time i login, it's first warning of a hdd would be failing. even if you lucky and still fine, it still have a negative effect,, your hdd access will be slow at some point/sector that affected. just return/rma it while it's still new, just dont take a risk.

 

[Blooker]

The information here was usefull already, but I have a slightly different case:

I had a few harddisks in a while, they shown 600 bad sectors or even more, gave 'condition' warnings (said they were low on health) in other words the utilities said it was near failure.

But the disks worked fine and never failed while oftenly used. How is that possible, can it be wrong S.M.A.R.T data, or can some kind of event through years mark a disk with it while it actually will last forever?

Sorry to bump this but it matches the extent of my question the best: How can it be near 'failure' while the result of the bad sectors (would be performance and other issues) is nowhere to be found

in other words, can something result in that info (disk attributes) being falsely reported as that to the utility

 

[RCoon]

The information here was usefull already, but I have a slightly different case:

I had a few harddisks in a while, they shown 600 bad sectors or even more, gave 'condition' warnings (said they were low on health) in other words the utilities said it was near failure.

But the disks worked fine and never failed while oftenly used. How is that possible, can it be wrong S.M.A.R.T data, or can some kind of event through years mark a disk with it while it actually will last forever?

Sorry to bump this but it matches the extent of my question the best: How can it be near 'failure' while the result of the bad sectors (would be performance and other issues) is nowhere to be found

in other words, can something result in that info (disk attributes) being falsely reported as that to the utility

If data is never hitting those sectors you won't notice it. Until the computer decides to dump data in the exact areas where those dodgy sectors are, the HDD will probably run fine. If however, you're doing some very important work, hit save, and the HDD decides it's time to save on those sectors, it'll probably crash and lose whatever it was trying to write in that area.

I Managed to backup an entire drive that had too many reallocated sectors, and it backed up the entire drive apart from about 3 movie files in a random folder. The computer would run fine until it had to seek around those files, and just crash.

Bottom line is, if Smart Data says imminent failure, backup and replace. Don't try to be smart about it (no pun intended).

 

[Ruyki]

The information here was usefull already, but I have a slightly different case:

I had a few harddisks in a while, they shown 600 bad sectors or even more, gave 'condition' warnings (said they were low on health) in other words the utilities said it was near failure.

But the disks worked fine and never failed while oftenly used. How is that possible, can it be wrong S.M.A.R.T data, or can some kind of event through years mark a disk with it while it actually will last forever?

Sorry to bump this but it matches the extent of my question the best: How can it be near 'failure' while the result of the bad sectors (would be performance and other issues) is nowhere to be found

in other words, can something result in that info (disk attributes) being falsely reported as that to the utility

I'm pretty sure that a drive never uses bad sectors again after they are found. So you should be fine if things stay as they are. However having bad sectors on a drive indicates that there might be a problem with it, a problem that can cause more bad sectors to appear at any time or the drive might just completely die.

You backup data right?

 

[librin.so.1]

FWIW, I had a torrent that would keep getting corrupt because one of its blocks kept getting written to a bad sector and thus kept failing its hash check when read. That very same HDD I mentioned in my post on the first page two years ago, BTW. Now at more or less stable 1290 bad sectors.