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

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

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