"BW" == Bruno Wolff bruno@wolff.to writes:
BW> It might be that the drive firmware has a bug where as the pending BW> sector count doesn't always get cleared when the sectors are BW> reallocated. I have a Maxtor drive that has that problem.
I've seen this on Western Digital and Seagate drives as well.
BW> It might also be that you have never written of the bad sectors so BW> the drive can't reallocate them.
I have used the "wipe drive" functionality in each drive's diagnostic utilities and used dd to zero the entire drive as well. The drives still report problems.
Unfortunately at this point I usually just throw them out, which is terribly wasteful but I can't trust them for important data and I can't get the manufacturer to replace them without an actual failure of their diagnostic tools.
- J<