Reliability of "Corrupted Sector Repair" (IBM DFT)

[Kevin Jarrett]

I have a three-year-old DJSA-232 32gb Travelstar laptop drive in my
Thinkpad T21. Recently encountered read errors during a Ghost backup.
I moved everything I needed off the drive and ran DFT; it confirmed
there were problems. Ran Corrupted Sector Repair and it seems to have
worked, no problems reported.

Just to be safe, I replaced the drive, and now plan to use it in a
removable tray (ultrabay) for Ghost backups. I just filled all 32gb
with test data without a problem.

1) Is CSR effective at actually eliminating drive errors?

2) What are the odds that more errors will occur?

TIA,

-kj-

KJ99GT DFT

 

[Rod Speed]

I have a three-year-old DJSA-232 32gb Travelstar laptop drive
in my Thinkpad T21. Recently encountered read errors during
a Ghost backup. I moved everything I needed off the drive and
ran DFT; it confirmed there were problems. Ran Corrupted
Sector Repair and it seems to have worked, no problems reported.

Just to be safe, I replaced the drive, and now plan to use
it in a removable tray (ultrabay) for Ghost backups. I just
filled all 32gb with test data without a problem.

1) Is CSR effective at actually eliminating drive errors?

There are two types of drive errors. Some are due to a
single or small number of adjacent sectors getting damaged
by various things like the drive not being able to handle
the lack of power properly. These can certainly be added
to the bad sector list and wont produce a problem again.
You may eventually run out of spares tho if that happens much.

The other cause is a dying hard drive
and DFT cant do anything about that.

Thats usually a mechanical problem in the connection
to the head, a crack in the flexible conductor, a dry
joint in one of the soldered connections etc.

2) What are the odds that more errors will occur?

There cant be any reliable numbers on the odds.

There certainly are some drives that can produce a
bad sector or a couple due to power problems but
by definition the odds of power problems arent definable.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I have a three-year-old DJSA-232 32gb Travelstar laptop drive in my
Thinkpad T21. Recently encountered read errors during a Ghost backup.
I moved everything I needed off the drive and ran DFT; it confirmed
there were problems. Ran Corrupted Sector Repair and it seems to have
worked, no problems reported.

Just to be safe, I replaced the drive, and now plan to use it in a
removable tray (ultrabay) for Ghost backups. I just filled all 32gb
with test data without a problem.

1) Is CSR effective at actually eliminating drive errors?

Yes. However some errors that are in files may be left alone.

2) What are the odds that more errors will occur?

If caused by external influences that still exist, certainly.
You need to eliminate those causes first.
If the drive is dying, then too but you may not find out
until the drive exhausted it's spares

 

[Arno Wagner]

I have a three-year-old DJSA-232 32gb Travelstar laptop drive in my
Thinkpad T21. Recently encountered read errors during a Ghost backup.
I moved everything I needed off the drive and ran DFT; it confirmed
there were problems. Ran Corrupted Sector Repair and it seems to have
worked, no problems reported.

Just to be safe, I replaced the drive, and now plan to use it in a
removable tray (ultrabay) for Ghost backups. I just filled all 32gb
with test data without a problem.

1) Is CSR effective at actually eliminating drive errors?

Yes. But they do not eleminate the problem that caused the
bas secorts. If there is s systematic problem, you will just
get new ones.

2) What are the odds that more errors will occur?

Pretty good. The drive is not trustworthy anymore. May take some weeks
though. There _is_ a chance that the drive will now stay error free,
but usually an older HDD developing errors is a bad sign.

Arno

 

[Kevin Jarrett]

Thanks for the feedback and 411 guys - I'll keep an eye on the drive
(and keep multiple backup sets). It won't be getting much use, maybe
an hour or so a month.

-kj-