How worried should I be?

Acronis shows current pending sector count as 40 and status as Degradation
but no other obvious errors.

No Reallocated Sector Count.

The disc is a 500GB SATA hard drive.
As far as I can recall this was the one I cloned when fitting a new
Sandisk SSD as the system drive, so there should really be no activity on
it.

Health is shown as 60%

I don't think that there is anything of value left on there.
Will check if I've belt and braces backup anywhere.

I could just leave it, run an error check on it, or do a full reformat
after backing up all the data.

What does the team think?


Dave R

--
AMD FX-6300 in GA-990X-Gaming SLI-CF running Windows 7 Pro x64

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In article <k616qvFle8kU4@mid.individual.net>, David wrote...

How worried should I be?

Acronis shows current pending sector count as 40 and status as Degradation but no other obvious errors.

No Reallocated Sector Count.

The disc is a 500GB SATA hard drive.
As far as I can recall this was the one I cloned when fitting a new
Sandisk SSD as the system drive, so there should really be no activity on
it.

Health is shown as 60%

I don't think that there is anything of value left on there.
Will check if I've belt and braces backup anywhere.

I could just leave it, run an error check on it, or do a full reformat
after backing up all the data.

What does the team think?

Dave R

I used Acronis Drive Monitor for a few years (I use HD Sentinel now). 60% is a very low score, and the disk should be retired ASAP. As I understand it, disks are supplied with a certain amount of hidden spare capacity which is used to re-map the occasional (inevitable) failing sector. The SMART metrics only show up when that spare capacity is used up, and the rot is spreading into the declared space. Junk it!

--

Phil, London

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On 26 Feb 2023 at 13:57:51 GMT, "David" <wibble@btinternet.com> wrote:

How worried should I be?

I'd retire it with prejudice.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"You could say that Apple charges for incremental
upgrades while Microsoft charges for excremental
ones" -- Daniel James, uk.c.h

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On 27/02/2023 in message <k63ev5Fcdk1U1@mid.individual.net> Jaimie
Vandenbergh wrote:

On 26 Feb 2023 at 13:57:51 GMT, "David" <wibble@btinternet.com> wrote:

How worried should I be?

I'd retire it with prejudice.

Cheers - Jaimie

Or a lump hammer?

--
Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to get along without it.

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On Sun, 26 Feb 2023 17:01:13 +0000, Philip Herlihy wrote:

In article <k616qvFle8kU4@mid.individual.net>, David wrote...

How worried should I be?

Acronis shows current pending sector count as 40 and status as
Degradation but no other obvious errors.

No Reallocated Sector Count.

The disc is a 500GB SATA hard drive.
As far as I can recall this was the one I cloned when fitting a new
Sandisk SSD as the system drive, so there should really be no activity
on it.

Health is shown as 60%

I don't think that there is anything of value left on there.
Will check if I've belt and braces backup anywhere.

I could just leave it, run an error check on it, or do a full reformat
after backing up all the data.

What does the team think?


Dave R

I used Acronis Drive Monitor for a few years (I use HD Sentinel now).
60% is a very low score, and the disk should be retired ASAP. As I understand it, disks are supplied with a certain amount of hidden spare capacity which is used to re-map the occasional (inevitable) failing
sector. The SMART metrics only show up when that spare capacity is used
up, and the rot is spreading into the declared space. Junk it!

First thing - if a track is reallocated should that not show up in the Reallocation Event Count?

Secondly, I can see Warning events from 20/02/2023 to 26/02/2023 in the
Events log but today 27/02/2023 the disc is showing no errors and 100%
clear.
Oh, I have one Reported Uncorrectable Errors.

So if I hadn't rebooted and seen the Acronis warning I would be none the
wiser.

Agree that it should be retired just puzzled about how an error can come
and then go.

Cheers



Dave R
--
AMD FX-6300 in GA-990X-Gaming SLI-CF running Windows 7 Pro x64

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On 27 Feb 2023 at 10:40:13 GMT, ""Jeff Gaines"" <jgnewsid@outlook.com>
wrote:

On 27/02/2023 in message <k63ev5Fcdk1U1@mid.individual.net> Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:

On 26 Feb 2023 at 13:57:51 GMT, "David" <wibble@btinternet.com> wrote:

How worried should I be?

I'd retire it with prejudice.

Cheers - Jaimie

Or a lump hammer?

I generally put a couple of 10mm drill holes through dead disks :)

Cheers - Jaimie
--
BANACH TARSKI is an anagram of BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI

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Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> wrote:

On 26 Feb 2023 at 13:57:51 GMT, "David" <wibble@btinternet.com> wrote:

How worried should I be?

I'd retire it with prejudice.

I'd just demote it to some use case where I don't care if it dies.
Sometimes you just need a disc and can easily form a plan B if it stops working. Like using it to hold a spare copy of Windows you can boot up in
case of trouble, or to experiment with Linux distros, or to copy files
between machines. Or even just as the Nth cold backup of something (odds
are that one of your N elderly drives will still work).

As long as it's never holding the only copy of data you care about, there
are still productive uses for it.

Theo

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On 27 Feb 2023 at 19:53:26 GMT, "Theo"
<theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> wrote:

On 26 Feb 2023 at 13:57:51 GMT, "David" <wibble@btinternet.com> wrote:

How worried should I be?

I'd retire it with prejudice.

I'd just demote it to some use case where I don't care if it dies.
Sometimes you just need a disc and can easily form a plan B if it stops working. Like using it to hold a spare copy of Windows you can boot up in case of trouble, or to experiment with Linux distros, or to copy files between machines. Or even just as the Nth cold backup of something (odds
are that one of your N elderly drives will still work).

As long as it's never holding the only copy of data you care about, there
are still productive uses for it.

I find the utility not worth the potential pain of semi-failure. I'd
never trust such a disk with an operating system - any time you have an
issue, is it OS config, bugs, or lost data? Nor for backups of any gen.

Perhaps as part of a RAID6 or more, but it's a half-terabyte disk and I
use 4T and 14T units. It's too small to be worth salvaging.

Cheers - Jaimie

--
Politicians are not born, they are excreted
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 BC

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On 27 Feb 2023 at 19:53:26 GMT, Theo wrote:

Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> wrote:

On 26 Feb 2023 at 13:57:51 GMT, "David" <wibble@btinternet.com> wrote:

How worried should I be?

I'd retire it with prejudice.

I'd just demote it to some use case where I don't care if it dies.
Sometimes you just need a disc and can easily form a plan B if it stops working. Like using it to hold a spare copy of Windows you can boot up in case of trouble, or to experiment with Linux distros, or to copy files between machines. Or even just as the Nth cold backup of something (odds
are that one of your N elderly drives will still work).

As long as it's never holding the only copy of data you care about, there
are still productive uses for it.

OOI, do you run a utility to check suspect drives - and if so, which?

I ask because twice now my Synology NAS has reported a catastrophic (not quite the word used but definitely 'replace without delay') failure. So I dutifully replaced the drive the first time. But when I reformatted and hooked it up to
a Windows computer, no faults found using the OS utilities.

The second time, recently, I simply reformatted within the Synology OS, let it run its own diagnostic (24 hours or so), and then rebuild the RAID. That was about 6 months back and all seems fine. But perhaps I need to run a more revealing diagnostic.

--
Cheers, Rob, Sheffield UK

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RJH <patchmoney@gmx.com> wrote:

On 27 Feb 2023 at 19:53:26 GMT, Theo wrote:

Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> wrote:

On 26 Feb 2023 at 13:57:51 GMT, "David" <wibble@btinternet.com> wrote:

How worried should I be?

I'd retire it with prejudice.

I'd just demote it to some use case where I don't care if it dies. Sometimes you just need a disc and can easily form a plan B if it stops working. Like using it to hold a spare copy of Windows you can boot up in case of trouble, or to experiment with Linux distros, or to copy files between machines. Or even just as the Nth cold backup of something (odds are that one of your N elderly drives will still work).

As long as it's never holding the only copy of data you care about, there are still productive uses for it.

OOI, do you run a utility to check suspect drives - and if so, which?

On Linux, I just do a complete fill with zeroes (which can take hours or
days depending on the drive size):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=10M status=progress

and then look in dmesg to see if there were any complaints from the SATA driver:

dmesg | grep sdX

If the disc wrote every sector successfully without the kernel reporting errors, it's in reasonable enough shape. It may have caused some sector reallocations (I would check the numbers with smartctl before and after),
but if it wrote successfully they're likely not egregious.

If the write throws up a lot of errors, or takes a surprisingly long time
(eg single digits MB/s rather than the ~100MB/s I'd expect), I'd bin the
drive.

Theo

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On 28 Feb 2023 at 10:19:01 GMT, Theo wrote:

RJH <patchmoney@gmx.com> wrote:

On 27 Feb 2023 at 19:53:26 GMT, Theo wrote:

Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> wrote:

On 26 Feb 2023 at 13:57:51 GMT, "David" <wibble@btinternet.com> wrote: >>>>

How worried should I be?

I'd retire it with prejudice.

I'd just demote it to some use case where I don't care if it dies.
Sometimes you just need a disc and can easily form a plan B if it stops
working. Like using it to hold a spare copy of Windows you can boot up in >>> case of trouble, or to experiment with Linux distros, or to copy files
between machines. Or even just as the Nth cold backup of something (odds >>> are that one of your N elderly drives will still work).

As long as it's never holding the only copy of data you care about, there >>> are still productive uses for it.

OOI, do you run a utility to check suspect drives - and if so, which?

On Linux, I just do a complete fill with zeroes (which can take hours or
days depending on the drive size):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=10M status=progress

and then look in dmesg to see if there were any complaints from the SATA driver:

dmesg | grep sdX

If the disc wrote every sector successfully without the kernel reporting errors, it's in reasonable enough shape. It may have caused some sector reallocations (I would check the numbers with smartctl before and after),
but if it wrote successfully they're likely not egregious.

If the write throws up a lot of errors, or takes a surprisingly long time
(eg single digits MB/s rather than the ~100MB/s I'd expect), I'd bin the drive.

Many thanks. It's a bit late for this drive now (it's in use) but I'll give that a whirl next time there's cause for concern.

--
Cheers, Rob, Sheffield UK

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