Bad disk count "improves"

[vknowles]

I have a drive that had some bad/weak sectors and has been stable for a while. Not to worry--I keep backups.

But oddly, I noticed a change in an unexpected direction. For weeks, it has consistently stated, "The drive found 53 bad sectors during its self test. There are 52 weak sectors found on the disk surface."

Then today I noticed the same message, except the 53 had become 52: "The drive found 52 bad sectors during its self test. There are 52 weak sectors found on the disk surface."

Does anyone have a good explanation for this?

Thanks!

[hdsentinel]

Yes, while it is rare, if the status is stable for long time, some hard disk models begin decreasing the count of bad sectors.

Generally these "bad sectors" reported in the text description are no longer used by the hard disk: instead a spare area is used for all reads and writes targeting those bad sectors. As these can no longer cause troubles, some hard disk firmwares designed to report less of them.

This is exactly what we can do with Offsets: as described at
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq_repair_ha ... _drive.php
we can manually reset the error counter, to be notified about only possible new problems, new issues / degradations.

Not all, but some hard disks do something similar automatically.

[vknowles]

Thanks for the explanation!