Re: [gentoo-user] smartctrl drive error @60%

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

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.  ;-) 

Dale

:-)  :-)