[CuriousNapper]

I have two drives that give SMART good status, but both HD tune pro and crystaldiskinfo give a warning. Each are hard for me to figure out.

First one is a Samsung, and it says it has only two bad sectors. What puzzles me is the threshold is five.
I am going to guess these numbers represent some other number, as a threshold of only five bad sectors is way too small.
I bring up this number because of the seagate drive below.



The seagate drive says it has 1360 bad sectors. The threshold is 36. yet the smart status is good.
Perhaps someone here can decipher seagate smart data.



If it has 1360 bad sectors, how much reallocation is left? I can't figure out the health of the drive. It would be nice to be able to know what percentage of life is left.

 

[MightyMiroWD]

Hey @CuriousNapper!

I will start with the first drive. The Interface CRC errors are caused by communication errors between the drive and the host (southbridge) and typically involve an issue with the drive, SATA cable or the motherboard. These errors aren't generally something to worry about in terms of an absolute count as errors may have occurred on day 1 and never re-occurred. Nonetheless, you should worry when it occasionally increases, which is why I would suggest to keep an eye on that one.

Reallocated Sector Count in SMART test is quite important as an indicator of bad sectors and a dying drive.

Reallocated sector basically means that your hard drive found a bad sector, and swapped it with a 'reserve pool' of sectors. After this swap, the medium should be free of bad sectors to the operating system. It's a technology designed to make failing sectors on the HDD cause no trouble for the operating system because it'll just swap a new one whenever it finds that a particular sector is becoming weak (because it takes more time to read that sector than normal).

However, there are a number potential problems that can occur:

1. The number of sectors available for replacement is limited. Once that number is reached no more sectors can be "fixed". A small number of reallocated sectors like in the first HDD may not be something serious, but the situation should be monitored.

2. The number of reallocated sectors can become large, as is the case with the second drive. The real problem is that there is usually some underlying reason for bad sectors developing and that problem is still there. Such problems are usually progressive and become more serious as time progresses. As the cause is usually unknowable so too is the time frame. The numbers could become very large in a very short period of time and essentially making the drive unusable, which is why I would suggest to make a backup of the most important data and look for a replacement.

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Cheers!

 

[CuriousNapper]

I understood that (though not as in detail)

I was just curious to have capacity was remaining. Threshold 99 /99 / 36, 1360 found is not very descriptive.

1360 of 3000? 36% left?

Thanks for the reply, it is appreciated.

 

[MightyMiroWD]

You're welcome!

The number of good sectors can be calculated - just check in the specsheet of the drive if the number of sectors are mentioned, and in case they are just deduct the number of bad sectors.