On  7 Dec 98 at 7:50, Roberto Safora Romay wrote:

> Commercially speaking. Should I admit that NEW HDDs bought from an
> authorized dealer, have some bad clusters?

> I was asking warranties for a 2.1 gb new one with Scandisk
> reporting two bad clusters( two big red Bs"), and a philosopical
> discussion of how many bad sectors a new hdd can have started.

> If I'm dealing with serius people, shouldnt I expect that no bad
> cluster appears for the whole warranty time?

> In my experience every time that a hdd starts reporting bad
> cluster, the problem increases with time.

  In the Olde Days of MFM and RLL, anything up to a dozen bad sectors
might be tolerated when a drive was being purchased.

  But these are not those days.  Parto of the manufacturing process
of modern IDE/EIDE/UDMA and SCSI drives is a low-level re-mapping
around surface defects so that no defects are visible to the user.  A
brand new modern drive should not show any such defects.

  A drive might still be considered usable if it were to develop,
say, TWO bad sectors over a couple of years' use.  With any luck, you
such a defect might be discovered by a "surface scan" (scandisk
"thorough" option) before you ever tried to use it to store data.

  The scenario to watch out for is the one where every time you boot,
it finds 2-5 NEW bad sectors.  This is a sign that the drive or
controller is rapidly declining and you have no time to lose in
rescuing your data!

  I would not accept two bad sectors on a *new* drive.  I wouldn't
consider two over the 1-3 year warranty period excessive.

David G

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