Tony Nelson wrote:
On 09-08-08 11:54:37, Bill Davidsen wrote:
...
I'm not sure what you expect low level formatting to do for you,
backing up and writing and reading to every sector will force all
current bad blocks to be found,
One thing is that each of those blocks requires a long seek to the
replacement block. After the drive manufacturer's low-level format,
all the blocks are in order, with only short skips past the bad blocks,
and possibly a slight reduction in the size of the spare blocks area.
but honestly "has developed many bad blocks" is another way of saying
"is failing" and is a hint to replace now. When a drive starts
relocating sectors (as seen in SMART), something is wrong with the
drive. ...
...
Modern drives (last 8 or so years) have good support for automatic
remapping of bad blocks, because bad blocks are expected at the
magnetic domain sizes being used. With Automatic Offline Testing
enabled, most bad blocks are remapped before complete failure and
without data loss.
I've been using one "dying" drive for 7 more years now (with one low-
level format), and another for about 4 more years. I'm using a drive
I found in a snowbank, without difficulty and without bad sectors. I
have SMART monitoring enabled, so email will be sent to root if SMART
gets unhappy, and Auto Offline Data Collection enabled, so blocks are
being salvaged as they go bad. I'm /not/ using that panicky Palimpsest
(gnome-disk-utility applet), so I don't get spurious warnings (moderate
numbers of reallocated sectors are not bad -- though offline-
uncorrectable and pending sectors are bad).
Depends on your ratio of time to money. I just bought a 500GB WD "green" drive
for about $55, I don't have to spend time fiddling with backups (not to mention
trusting them) other than the regular, and I can do each of the steps to clone
and verify, including the drive swaps, in time increments shorter than a
commercial break or a kernel compile. So I can watch a game or race with my wife
or while something downloads, or compiles, or I'm on hold with vendor support,
and I value my time a lot more than $55. Actually if I save billable time I make
money, but that's a different issue.
If you like to fiddle with computer hardware, or are on a tight budget, getting
the last rotation out of the drive makes sense. I regularly give my old drives
to my assorted relatives because replace or upgrade makes sense to me. I have an
obsolete machine with DBAN as the OS. ;-)
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
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