# 1 Bad Sector on my Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB. Is this a bad thing?



## Peter1986C (Jan 4, 2013)

I have 1 Bad Sector on my Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB. 
Is this a bad thing? 
It is there for already a few months (since August the 27th, 2012), so I guess the drive will last for quite some time still?


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## Jack1n (Jan 4, 2013)

Yes it should still last a while,you only lose like 4Kbits of capacity,same thing happened to my 640GB
Caviar black and its still running fine.


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## Peter1986C (Jan 4, 2013)

Thanks. Is "at least another year" a reasonable expectation? I am asking this because I might spent money I got for Christmas on a SSD (as OS/progs drive), but if the expected life of this HDD is less than a year I will rather go the HDD route.


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## Mussels (Jan 4, 2013)

some drives last forever with a few bad sectors, others the problem just gets worse and worse until they die.


dont keep anything important on the drive, and/or make backups regularly just to be sure.


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## saknid (Jan 4, 2013)

Chevalr1c said:


> since August the 27th, 2012



@Chevalr1c Better option make backup for the data and simply use the warranty period option and change the HDD from the comp as the HDD is quite new...It will not cost any thing at all...

Apart from that the HDD will run all fine with that Bad Sector as the same problem I have in my WMD 250 GB but still that is running all fine...


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## Mussels (Jan 4, 2013)

i've got two 2.5" drives that went from a few bad sectors to unusable in just two weeks of being in my girlfriends possesion.

i've also got a samsung internal 3.5" that was 'dead' until i made an empty 512MB partition at the start of the drive (where the bad sector was) and has worked fine for years.


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## Peter1986C (Jan 4, 2013)

Back-ups are made at least once every week (important stuff goes onto a USB-stick the same day during which changes are made). But just to be safe I will buy another mechanical drive that I will use as main drive, dropping the SSD plan.

@saknid: the bad sector is there since that date, I own the HDD since July 2009 and it is there for out of warranty as it is 3.5 years old (I checked via Seagate's website, using the serial number just to be sure).


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## Mussels (Jan 4, 2013)

if its only got one bad sector since last august, i'd say its stable. get your SSD and stick with your current backup plan.


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## Tatty_One (Jan 4, 2013)

Silly thing is, most if not all HDD's have bad sectors from day 1 manufacture, When you buy a brand new hard disk, you will most likely be completely unaware of these bad sectors and the numbers because they are 'mapped out' using 'translator' algorithms.  All modern hard disk drives have a *spare sector pool*. This is used when bad sectors develop during the normal life of the hard disk and any newly found bad sectors are 'replaced' with good ones from the spare sector pool. This process is invisible to the user and they will probably never know that anything has changed

If your bad sector has occured since you started using it.... which it sounds like, then the sector will be auto re-mapped with the bad sector mapped out, therefore a particular block would end up looking like this......

0,1,2,3,4,5,*G*,7,8,9,10  ( G = Bad! )  

This however is an invisible process so if the user checked the *G* it would still show as 6 in this example.  When your HDD is powered up, it reads the "G State" as it is known..... in this case, it is read from the Ram on the controller card, this "should" mean that the sector is replaced and therefore is no longer "bad", so nothing to worry about (unless of course a bad sector occurs in your boot sector, simply because the re-mapping would not take place until next start up by which time it's too late!)....... that is the way I understand it anyways.

For those that have had bad sectors cause HDD failure in the past it will most probably be for one of 2 reasons.... either bad sectors corrupted the Boot sector or the user has accumilated so many bad sectors that all of the spares in the "spare sector pool" have run out.


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## Frag_Maniac (Jan 4, 2013)

I've had tools (such as Auslogics Boostspeed) detect a bad sector, then be able to repair it. Since then I've never seen it report a bad sector. This is a Seagate 1TB Barracuda btw.


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## Jetster (Jan 5, 2013)

The 7200.12 is a decent drive. But if its over 4 years old then I would prepare for a failure. Could come at anytime


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## Frag_Maniac (Jan 5, 2013)

Often times even long term failures can be warded off by some common sense.  A lot of people don't do regular defrags. If you wait until the drive is very fragmented and do a marathon defrag, it's a LOT harder on the drive.


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## Peter1986C (Jan 5, 2013)

If a drive is fragmented more than say, 20%, I defrag. It never went that bad since years really (I was still using 98SE when I accidentally made it happen that I needed a marathon defrag). Maybe it is an advantage of having multiple partitions, i.e. less room within a filesystem to kick stuff around.


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## Frag_Maniac (Jan 5, 2013)

The number of drives or partitions has nothing to do with fragmented files. It's that MS has piss poor standards for the infinite number and type of installers that anyone can write for their OS, many of which severely fragment the files.

That's why it's always best to defrag right after installing something.


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## saknid (Jan 5, 2013)

Mussels said:


> if its only got one bad sector since last august, i'd say its stable. get your SSD and stick with your current backup plan.





Mussels is very right go with the new SSD as I told you before I do have a HDD with a Bad sector and trust me I am going all fine...apart from that you are also backing up your data 

and first sight It seems that the given date is "purchase date" call once on the companies help line as I also have one HDD from segate on which I have 5 Years warranty...Try it..



Frag Maniac said:


> That's why it's always best to defrag right after installing something.



+1 @Frag Maniac 

I don't know whether defraging will help in this case or not but seriously In my case I installed a dx10 based game and facing problem of lag and slow response then some one from TPU suggest me the same to do a defrag after every installation and now the game is going good...So I will try this option too..


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## 95Viper (Jan 5, 2013)

Tatty_One covered it in his post.

But, here is a quote from Section 4 of the Seatools for DOS readme:



> By design, modern disc drives maintain spare sectors for reallocation
> purposes. Usually, sectors become difficult to read long before they
> become impossible to read. In this situation the actual data bytes in
> the sector are preserved and transferred to the new spare during a
> ...



Check the drive every once in a while; and, if you start getting an increased re-located sector count, then think about a new HDD.  
I have had drives lose a sector or two and then never have another problem... then again, I have seen a drive just die with out any warning.

Buy a nice SSD and enjoy.


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## silkstone (Jan 5, 2013)

you could always use HDD regenerator, the free trial will fix 1 bad sector for you. I've had great success with it and managed to revive an old 500gb samsung from the dead.

If you are truly worried, just RMA it and get a replacement.


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## qubit (Jan 5, 2013)

While that drive might last, I'd RMA it if it's still under warranty. You're likely to get a better ie bigger drive back, too.

Also, to stop Seagate potentially quibbling about this and returning it as no fault found and BSing you that this is normal, you might want to make it more obviously faulty first. 

Just remember to have a backup of your data first...

If the drive is out of warranty, then just use it as a temporary spare for fiddling about with to avoid the potential headache of a failure. I have an old Maxtor 200GB drive that will spontaneously forget its partitions without warning after a few weeks or months, losing everything. Works fine after repartitioning and formatting. After the fourth time however, I finally conceded that it wasn't a one-off. 

Tatty's description of how the remapping works was great and a delight to read.


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## BazookaJoe (Jan 5, 2013)

I think it's all been said, but in my experience even 1 bad sector is a sign that you SHOULD replace, or at least begin religious backups as soon as possible - whilst some drives may run for years with bad sectors, its just not reasonable to expect that simply because there is only a small error that it it is not possibly a sign of a much larger problem.

I personally had a 30GB drive years ago that suffered almost 6GB of damage to the beginning of the drive, and I partitioned it off and gave it to a friend who wanted to "take his chances" with it and it ran flawlessly as a 22GB drive for 5 years - it CAN happen, but it is unlikely that it will.


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## Peter1986C (Jan 5, 2013)

Thanks guys.

As stated before the drive is not under warranty at Seagate anymore (I checked using the serial number of the drive on their site) and I know that the e-tailer I bought it from likes to say "ain't broken" if hardware is not dead enough. If disk health starts to sink under 90% in Hard Disk Sentinel I will still try @ my supplier though.

I will keep to my back-up plans and if I get trouble I will buy a (small) HDD, for data it does not need to be as fast one so that won't be much money. An SSD has been ordered yesterday, btw.


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## Mussels (Jan 5, 2013)

silkstone said:


> you could always use HDD regenerator, the free trial will fix 1 bad sector for you. I've had great success with it and managed to revive an old 500gb samsung from the dead.
> 
> If you are truly worried, just RMA it and get a replacement.



looking into that for my bad seagates now.


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## Jetster (Jan 5, 2013)

Spinrite is a hard drive "restorer" as well although I have not had much success with ether.


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## itsakjt (Jan 5, 2013)

Is the bad sector pending or reallocated. If it is pending then you can get it fixed by using SeaTools. If it is reallocated, then nothing you can do.


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## Mussels (Jan 6, 2013)

that HDD regenerator seems pretty damn cool, it can make bootable CD/USB devices to repair the drives, or repair in windows.


currently using it on my stockpile of 'bad' drives to see what i can find.

thanks again for linking it in the thread - seems like an awesome program.


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## silkstone (Jan 6, 2013)

Mussels said:


> that HDD regenerator seems pretty damn cool, it can make bootable CD/USB devices to repair the drives, or repair in windows.
> 
> 
> currently using it on my stockpile of 'bad' drives to see what i can find.
> ...



another one you might want to use in combination is "Vivard" I used a combination of the two to restore my drive.

First vivard found and marked the bad sectors then 2 runs of hdd regenerator seemed to fix them all. No problems since. PM me if you'd like me to e-mail you the programs or link them somewhere.

Edit - I had no luck whatsoever with spinrite  it would always crash half way through scanning the drive.. too badly damaged, i guess.


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## Peter1986C (Jan 6, 2013)

itsakjt said:


> Is the bad sector pending or reallocated. If it is pending then you can get it fixed by using SeaTools. If it is reallocated, then nothing you can do.



It is reallocated stuff, and I forgot to tell I used Seatools for DOS (the bootable medium flavour of Seatools) and that program told me the drive is okay.
Hard Disk Sentinel and also GNOME Disks tell me the drive is ok (and having one bad sector).


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## Jetster (Jan 6, 2013)

Then the drive is fine


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## itsakjt (Jan 6, 2013)

Yeah it is fine.


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