[ale] Which large capacity drives are you having the best luck with?

[Pat Regan]

On Wed, 05 Jan 2011 11:23:47 -0500
Ron Frazier <atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com> wrote:

> However, even if there are not obvious results, the intensive read
> rewrite process will refresh weak data and improve the reliability of
> the drive.  If data is unreadable, it will go to EXTREME measures to
> recover it.  Even normal operations are slow.  It just so happens that
> I'm running Spinrite at the moment on my Son's laptop with a 250 GB
> drive.  I'm using the most intensive level of analysis.  It's almost
> finished after 20 hours with no errors.  I think my hard drives are a
> bit faster than my Son's.

If there are no read errors on a drive Spinright's rewrite cycle is of
no use whatsoever.

Spinrite's rewriting exploits the fact that IDE and SATA drives will
only relocate a bad sector on a write and not on a read.  SCSI and SAS
drives will relocate a bad sector on a read, or at least they should.

Once a drive starts relocating sectors it is usually the beginning of
the end of its useful like.  I don't trust data to drives that start
showing read errors.

Hard drives are very cheap.  Your data is probably valuable.  

> Don't be alarmed if you see lots of seek errors on the SMART
> monitoring screen.  Seagate drives, in particular, show huge numbers
> here.  I don't think they are accurate.  Other drives may do that as
> well.  Apparently it's fairly common.  It does NOT mean the drive is
> about to blow up.  I would confirm any errors on the SMART monitoring
> screen with another application, as that's not Spinrite's main
> purpose.  The video, linked below, talks about how to interpret smart
> data.  One useful piece to monitor is the error rate.

Don't put too much faith in smart.  If smart says a drive is dying it
most definitely is.  The inverse isn't true.  I've had plenty of drives
die that recently passed a full smart test.

I've never run Spinrite and I probably never will.  I understand how
and why it works but I see little value in rewriting data to a failing
drive.  It seems much safer to me to write the recovered data to a good
drive.

Pat