On 7 Feb 2003, at 10:53, Demetri Kolokotronis wrote:

> On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 17:57:31 -0500 "Gregory A. Moyer"
> <[log in to unmask]> writes:
> > Thanks all for the help, scandisk is reporting bad clusters, the
> > drive is 3 years old.
>
> You do not state extent of bad clusters; some bad clusters is normal.

  Some readers have questioned this statement.

  It is virtually impossible to manufacture a flawless drive surface; it is
certainly impractical to try to do so at a price that consumers can afford.

  In the period roughly from 1985-95, it was routine for manufacturers to
test the drive surface before shipping, and mark the defective spots
"unusable".  If there were more than a dozen or so of these, the entire
drive would be declared defective and disposed of somehow.
  If the end user did a low-level reformat of the drive, they would have to
re-enter the list of bad sectors, which was usually pasted to the drive
casing for this purpose.

  Part of the evolution of IDE/ATAPI and SCSI drives was the integration of
much more sophisticated drive control hardware and software on the drive
itself.  One of the functions included in this development was the capacity
to "re-map" logical clusters to physical locations on the drive surface.
  Effectively, modern drives do an excellent job of hiding the small number
of manufacturing defects from the OS and the user.  It is no longer "normal"
to see these reported by utilities such as scandisk.

  If scandisk is finding bad clusters, the odds are very good that these are
not original manufacturing defects, but represent wear or other consequences
of the fact the drive has been in use for three years.  If the
number/location of found bad clusters is changing from one scandisk to the
next -- especially if it is finding a few NEW defects each time -- then the
drive is deteriorating and is likely to fail completely soon.
  Rescue your data while you (hopefully) still can!

David Gillett

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