On Sunday 29 Jun 2014 05:44:38 Dale wrote:
> Rich Freeman wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 11:27 PM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> So, thoughts?  Did it mark that part as bad and all is well or is this
> >> going to be trouble down the line?  Should I just fill the thing up with
> >> data and test the stuffin out of it to make sure?
> > 
> > That is pretty typical.  You wrote to every sector on the drive.  You
> > don't need to be able to read a sector to overwrite it, so doing this
> > cleared out the drive's list of offline uncorrectable sectors.  If
> > you're fortunate it relocated those sectors in which case the drive is
> > only using good sectors now.  It can't relocate a sector unless it
> > either gets a successful read, or it is overwritten, and you overwrote
> > them.
> > 
> > Either way the extended offline test passing isn't unusual.  Either it
> > relocated the sectors in which case the drive is "completely good" or
> > the data written to the bad sectors was readable when the test was
> > run, which doesn't guarantee that it will still be readable a
> > day/week/month/year from now.
> > 
> > Unfortunately I don't think there is any way to find out what the
> > firmware is doing, or to predict the likelihood of another failure.
> > The only thing we can say for sure that like all hard drives, it WILL
> > fail sometime.
> > 
> > Rich
> 
> What if I copied data to the drive until it was just about full.  I'm
> thinking like maybe 90 or 95% or so.  If I do that and run the test
> every few days, would it then catch a error after a few weeks or so of
> testing?  I realize no one knows with 100% certainty but I would like to
> backup my data say every couple weeks just in case.  If the drive works,
> fine.  If it fails, well, it wouldn't be the first time and it won't be
> a primary drive so no big loss.
> 
> I got to find me a good drive for backups tho.  I'm waiting on a good
> sale of a brand other than Seagate tho.  That should help keep two
> drives from failing at the same time.  Well, a little anyway.  I think
> it is called Dale's Law now.  ;-)

I'm not sure what it is called, but it seems infectious!  I have a drive (in a 
laptop) which I recently zeroed out with dd and fsck -c for good measure, 
before I installed gentoo on it.  Yesterday, I tried a long test, but it won't 
complete.  It reached "10% remaining" and it stayed there for a few hours.  I 
will repeat the test to see if it gets through this time, but I am worried 
that it's on its way out.

Oh well, I may install an SSD if it fails.

-- 
Regards,
Mick