Bad sectors magically dissapeared

[JW The Computer Guy]

As the title states, I'm having an issue with one of my drives and I'm not sure if it's good or bad. The other day I checked the SMART data on my HDD, and it said it had 3 bad sectors. Just now, I looked at the SMART data again, and it's not showing any bad sectors at all, and saying the drive is at 100% health. Usually it will still show the amount of bad sectors even if they get remapped. Also, the drive is not having any performance issues.

the drive is a 320GB Seagate ST3320820AS.

I find it strange that they randomly disappeared

 

[Mr.Mike]

What testing did you do and with what program? GSmartControl? Have you done the long extended tests? Try that and see what happens. It will take some time but it may end up being well worth it. Maybe you should also take a closer look each partition to make sure recovery data and even system data is intact. No boot problems, right?

 

[JW The Computer Guy]

What testing did you do and with what program? GSmartControl? Have you done the long extended tests? Try that and see what happens. It will take some time but it may end up being well worth it. Maybe you should also take a closer look each partition to make sure recovery data and even system data is intact. No boot problems, right?

I used Hard Disk Sentinel and Crystal Disk Info. I have not run any tests on the drive yet due the drive being in my main machine which is frequently being used. I have not had any problems with the drive at all.

 

[Mr.Mike]

I used Hard Disk Sentinel and Crystal Disk Info. I have not run any tests on the drive yet due the drive being in my main machine which is frequently being used. I have not had any problems with the drive at all.

I don't know about HDS, but Crystal Disk does no testing, it just monitors. I would download the manufacturer's test and run that. Seagate? WD" Hitachi?

 

[technibbling]

Phantom sectors?

"The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 20 characters."

 

[RedFoxComp]

The sectors might have just been marked as pending bad, meaning the disk firmware will try to write to them a few more times before they are permanently marked bad. If it succeeds in writing to the sectors they will be marked good again. This prevents the disk from marking sectors as bad unecessarily because of a power interruption or firmware anomaly.

If the drive has a lot of hours on it, you might want to check it with HDDScan and see the sector response times in the Map feature when scanning. If you have a lot of sectors responding very slowly you should just trash the drive because it's going to fail soon.

 

[Vicenarian]

The sectors might have just been marked as pending bad, meaning the disk firmware will try to write to them a few more times before they are permanently marked bad. If it succeeds in writing to the sectors they will be marked good again. This prevents the disk from marking sectors as bad unecessarily because of a power interruption or firmware anomaly.

If the drive has a lot of hours on it, you might want to check it with HDDScan and see the sector response times in the Map feature when scanning. If you have a lot of sectors responding very slowly you should just trash the drive because it's going to fail soon.

just a quick question; how many slow/unresponsive sectors would you say is the threshold, before declaring a drive 'bad'?

 

[RedFoxComp]

just a quick question; how many slow/unresponsive sectors would you say is the threshold, before declaring a drive 'bad'?

Depends on the number of sectors, the age of the drive and the distribution of response times for the rest of the sectors.

If you have 1-50 or so in the orange or red and the rest are fast and the drive is newer, then it should be fine.

However, if you have 1-50 in the orange/red and there are a lot in the >150ms category and the drive is older, I would replace it since it's a good indication the drive is on it's last legs. (unless its an older computer where the customer is just waiting for it to die before buying a new one) Yeah, it really is a judgement call.

Also, the other poster was right about HDDscan showing slow sectors from other apps accessing the disk. You really should run it from a boot CD and not the installed OS. I just use hirens.

 

[iisjman07]

SMART data is stored on the disk surface itself and is liable to corruption. I'd recommend testing the drive fully.

 

[JW The Computer Guy]

I've used HDDscan in the past, but it sometimes show different SMART values
ie. Crystaldiskinfo and other SMART monitoring apps will say the drive is failing while HDDscan will say the drive is fine.

 

[JW The Computer Guy]

I don't know about HDS, but Crystal Disk does no testing, it just monitors. I would download the manufacturer's test and run that. Seagate? WD" Hitachi?

Hard Disk Sentinal is under Hard Disk tools when you boot from the Hiren's Boot CD. I will run the seagate seatools when I get a chance. The drive doesn't have anything important on it.

 

[PcTek9]

Well, and other weird things...

Sometimes... like for instance, i bought a seagate drive using some new technology that was not supposed to be so prone to drive defects. Unfortunately the new coating they put on the drive was found to fleck off, and cause more defects than previous other drives. Of course SeaGate being the great company they are wouldn't replace the drive using the crappy defective technology, even though they know and admit that the technology was defective itself, and they no longer install it on newer drives. So I'm just wondering if in your case it was a particle from the drive itself that maybe flew up and got in the way then was later pulled to the drives internal particle filter.

So how can a sector be defective and not be defective? idk, maybe a microparticle of dust was there and some vibrations moved it to the drives internal particle filter.

Electronics don't generally repair themselves, so i would claim chaos theory on this one. I would be suspicious of it. I would suspect something was there, which might indicate flecking of the drive platter coating.