From: "Bruno Wolff III" <bruno@xxxxxxxx>
On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 16:25:09 -0400,
Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I had a bad sector and used the methods below, 2 days later the drive
croaked! RMA'd it today. Bad sector? RMA it!
Bad sectors are expected on consumer drives and you are unlikely to be
able to RMA a drive because of one bad sector. Modern drives are designed
to be able to have some bad sectors.
Corrected bad sectors leave the drive technically good. If the drive
is growing bad sectors it is a good idea to take that as a warning
and make sure you back it up and have a spare drive. I have one
cold spare for every RAID array. I don't place critical data of
any sort on single disks. I do backup the single disks for such
"important" data as might exist on the drives. I keep some other
spare drives around for their raw utility value.
A drive that is growing bad blocks, even corrected bad blocks, rapidly
will fail soon. Keep it exercised. Keep it backed up to another drive,
perhaps ad-hoc mirrored. Then when it does die you send it back to the
manufacturer. (Note, Maxtor HAS replaced a pair of drives for me that
had developed errors which tested out on the PowerMax scan even though
a subsequent reformat cleared the errors. As it turns out the drives
were not at fault (!). Something in a Promise RAID controller was bad
and created the bad blocks somehow - at the same absolute disk block
on both drives. I shamefacedly admit it took me too long to figure out
that was just way too big a coincidence even for a manufacturing
defect. But when your data is having on the line in a three disk RAID 5
arrangement with one disk claiming it's failed rationality starts to
depart quickly. <sigh>)
{^_^}
