Re: writing zeros to bad sector results in persistent read error

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On Jun 8, 2014, at 2:10 AM, Wilson Jonathan <piercing_male@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Sat, 2014-06-07 at 18:52 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> I wrote:
>>> How can there still be pending bad sectors, and yet no error and LBA reported?
>> 
>> So I started another -t long test. And it comes up with an LBA not previously reported.
>> 
>> # 1  Extended offline    Completed: read failure       60%      1214         430234064
>> 
>> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=430234064 count=8
>> dd: writing to ‘/dev/sda’: Input/output error
>> 1+0 records in
>> 0+0 records out
>> 0 bytes (0 B) copied, 3.63342 s, 0.0 kB/s
>> 
>> On this sector the technique fails.
>> 
>> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=430234064 count=8 oflag=direct
>> 8+0 records in
>> 8+0 records out
>> 4096 bytes (4.1 kB) copied, 3.73824 s, 1.1 kB/s
> 
> I may be missing something here, but surely after all this faffing about
> and errors isn't it about time to replicate the data to a new drive and
> then hit this one repeatedly with a very large hammer.
> 
> The law of diminishing returns must surely be coming into play by now.

No the question here isn't what's the right course of action from this point. This is an academic question: whether the reported behavior(s) are as designed.

>From an enterprise perspective, my understanding is even one bad sector is disqualifying and the drive goes back to the manufacturer if it's under warranty; or otherwise demoted for less important use if it's not.

For consumer drives, which this is, all the manufacturers will say the drive is functioning as designed with bad sectors *if* they're being reallocated. Maybe some of them won't quibble and will send a replacement drive anyway.

But what I'm reporting is an instance where an ATA Secure Erase definitely did not fix up a single one of the bad sectors. Maybe that's consistent with the spec, I don't know, but it's not what I'd expect seeing as every sector, those with an without LBA's assigned, are overwritten. Yet pending sectors were not remapped. Further, with all sectors overwritten by software (not merely the ATA Secure Erase command) yields no errors yet SMART reports there are still pending sectors, yet it's own extended test says there are none. I think that's bad behavior. But perhaps I don't understand the design and it's actually working as designed.


Chris Murphy--
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