Is SMART really that dumb?

[Dave Ihnat]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 09:56:46PM -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> There isn't anything vitally important on this drive,
> but I have lots of space on my new USB3 backup drive
> so I'm doing an rsync of the stuff it would be
> inconvenient to lose now (maybe that will trigger
> an I/O error somewhere).

I apologize if this has been mentioned earlier--I just stuck my nose in on
the thread, and if so, expect it to be chopped off.

But by the time you actually see block failures on a drive, you're already
in trouble.  Internally, the drive will detect bad blocks in operation,
mark them bad, and reallocate from its reserve pool.  It only allows errors
to be seen by the host OS when it can't do this--meaning it's had enough
bad blocks accumulating to exhaust its pool.

Drives be cheap; data be expensive.  I'd just get everything off this drive
and deep six it.

Cheers,
--
	Dave Ihnat
	dihnat at dminet.com