Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count Growing: Reformat Helps ?

One of the dozen drives in a backup server I am trying to configure has
suddenly begun to grow it's "Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count" and a
few other indicators like "Reallocation Event Count", and "Spin Retry
Count".

viz:
https://picasaweb.google.com/1081497...22361330176738


The Question:

Is the long Format that I am currently running on it stand any chance of
remedying the situation ?

Or is this thing obviously on the way out and it's time to retire it ?
--
Pete Cresswell

On 11/10/2015 09:03 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
One of the dozen drives in a backup server I am trying to configure has
suddenly begun to grow it's "Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count" and a
few other indicators like "Reallocation Event Count", and "Spin Retry
Count".

viz:
https://picasaweb.google.com/1081497...22361330176738


The Question:

Is the long Format that I am currently running on it stand any chance of
remedying the situation ?

Or is this thing obviously on the way out and it's time to retire it ?




Don't bother fooling with it, replace it.

Per (PeteCresswell):
The Question:

I should add that there is another drive with a suspiciously-similar
history..... AND..... both drives are on the same 2-port el-cheapo SATA
card (Initio INIC1620 S-ATA Adapter (PCI/CC_010600).

Where I'm going (unencumbered by any real knowledge) is that it seems
like quite a coincidence... and maybe I'm looking for a new SATA card
instead of new drive(s)....

i.e. Could those errors be artifacts of a bad SATA card ?

I've also had a half-dozen BSODs just today as I have been
programatically Removing/Formatting/Adding discs from/to DriveBender's
pool.

If they are, would the damage be permanent ?

Some sort of low-level format to re-assess all the sectors after I've
replaced that SATA card ? (i.e. the kind I am doing on one of the
drives right now: Windows' non-Quick Format)
--
Pete Cresswell

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per (PeteCresswell):
The Question:

I should add that there is another drive with a suspiciously-similar
history..... AND..... both drives are on the same 2-port el-cheapo SATA
card (Initio INIC1620 S-ATA Adapter (PCI/CC_010600).

Where I'm going (unencumbered by any real knowledge) is that it seems
like quite a coincidence... and maybe I'm looking for a new SATA card
instead of new drive(s)....

i.e. Could those errors be artifacts of a bad SATA card ?

I've also had a half-dozen BSODs just today as I have been
programatically Removing/Formatting/Adding discs from/to DriveBender's
pool.

If they are, would the damage be permanent ?

Some sort of low-level format to re-assess all the sectors after I've
replaced that SATA card ? (i.e. the kind I am doing on one of the
drives right now: Windows' non-Quick Format)

The sparing system is automatic and cannot be reset.
That's the ATA way.

On SCSI, you could load the factory defect table, and
start the detection of bad blocks over again. I did
that once at work, for fun, and the eventual resulting
grown defect table was very similar to the table before
I made it start over again.

If you are doing an operation which spans from one
end of the drive to another, that's an excellent opportunity
to uncover silent faults. Otherwise, at-rest data might never
get accessed on a server, and you'd never know until you got
there, that there is trouble.

I had something similar happen here, with a 500GB drive.
Some operation going from end to end causes a couple hundred
reallocations to appear in SMART. Any time I would do another
lengthy operation, it would add a bunch more. The drive
is still not dead.

What SMART seems to do, is "promote drive replacement".
And could be viewed as "good for business". I use
HDTune read transfer rate benchmark as a second opinion,
as the transfer rate curve can tell you about bad
spots on the disk, before SMART even hears about them.

The "Reallocations" entry is thresholded. When the drive
leaves the factory, it *always* has defects that are
spared out. The surface of the platter isn't perfect
by any stretch of the imagination. So the defects
have to pass a threshold, before something non-zero
appears in SMART.

Paul