When does an HDD replace bad sectors?

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pimpom

I understand that a modern HDD has many spare sectors which it automatically
substitues for bad sectors until it runs out of spares, and that a bad
sector showing up in the OS is a sign that the drive has aged too much to be
reliable.

But when does the substitution take place? I expect that, for one, it
happens during a full format. Does it also happen quietly in the background
on the fly during normal use under an OS?
 
pimpom said:
I understand that a modern HDD has many spare sectors which it automatically
substitues for bad sectors until it runs out of spares, and that a bad
sector showing up in the OS is a sign that the drive has aged too much to be
reliable.

But when does the substitution take place? I expect that, for one, it
happens during a full format. Does it also happen quietly in the background
on the fly during normal use under an OS?
Click to expand...

A write to the sector, sounds like an excellent time to handle
suspect sectors.

SMART has a couple statistics

Reallocated_Sector_Count

Current_Pending_Sector

A reallocated sector, is one that has been replaced. There are only
so many spares in a given locality to a bad sector, so eventually
a sector may not be repairable. For example, it wouldn't make
sense for sector 0, to be used as a replacement for sector 10000000.

The "Current_Pending", suggests that during a read attempt, a sector
got marked as being dodgy. The drive can't do anything about it,
until a write is attempted. On the write, the controller knows
what the new data is supposed to be, so it is in a better
situation to do a potential reallocation. The Current_Pending
value gets decremented by one, and maybe the Reallocated
gets incremented by one. If the sector tested as OK, it
might not get reallocated.

I tried looking for a description with more algorithmic details,
but couldn't find anything worth repeating.

You could look at PDF page 22 here. It is purposefully vague,
because being a spec handed to customers, they don't want to
commit to anything.

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/tech...F435EEB0862572F10049BAFD/$file/5K250_spec.pdf

Paul
 
In message <[email protected]> Manuel
To fix errors in an HDD you need to run utilities like CHKDSK, short
for "Check Disk".
Click to expand...

That will check filesystem integrity and/or help to deal with bad
sectors in software. However, most hard drives have the ability to
remap bad sectors, and will do so whenever there is a repeated write
failure on a given sector.
 
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