How bad are bad sectors on a hard drive really? If a tool (e.g. disk utility from ubuntu/gnome) reports bad sectors on a disk, what is the expected time to death? (assuming the bad sector did not damage any existing files).
1 Answer
Depends on the file system format and the pace of physical degrading.
In case of traditional hard disk drives, since the Seagate Barracuda series arose circa ten years ago, I lost no disk because of bad sectors, but earlier than those disks I remember that already FAT32 and NTFS where enough good handling them.
So I would expect a very good support of bad sectors by FOSS file system formats and tools.
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2As long as the number of bad sectors doesn't grow… If it grows, then backup your data and replace the hard drive. Jan 2, 2014 at 8:05