On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 5:52 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno(a)wolff.to> wrote:
That depends on whether you time or money are more valuable.
Certainly
for a business the above is a reasonable strategy. For a hobbiest, continuing
to use a drive after it has a few reallocated sectors may be a very reasonable
course of action.
If the only problem was that some sectors got remapped, it shouldn't
be failing any of the tests. At worst, it would simply report that
the remapping had taken place, but that the test had passed.
And in fact, back in the day I made a practice of backing up then
destructively bad-sector testing all of my drives once a year or so,
because the drives of the time just weren't anywhere near as reliable
as today's drives. Doing so enabled some of my drives to last ten
years.
What would be a problem though is unrecoverable errors.
Don Quixote
--
Don Quixote de la Mancha
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