Well this should explain it better
You can't get rid of the smart errors using checkdisk. The HD firmware will do transparent bad sector reallocation, outside of windows control. There is reserve space on the disk for it to be able to transparently do this until that area of the disk fills up. SMART will have thresholds in place, once the reallocated sector count gets high enough it will trigger the warning/error. The bad sectors still shouldn't be visible to windows at this point.
If it ever gets to the point where windows can see bad sectors (ie you can use checkdisk to find them and mark them as bad), the area assigned for re-allocation has filled up and the HD can't do it transparently any more, and its time to chuck the disk.
and this is the wikipedia definition of reallocated sector count
Count of reallocated sectors. When the hard drive finds a read/write/verification error, it marks that sector as "reallocated" and transfers data to a special reserved area (spare area). This process is also known as remapping, and reallocated sectors are called "remaps". The raw value normally represents a count of the bad sectors that have been found and remapped. Thus, the higher the attribute value, the more sectors the drive has had to reallocate. This allows a drive with bad sectors to continue operation; however, a drive which has had any reallocations at all is significantly more likely to fail in the near future.[2] While primarily used as a metric of the life expectancy of the drive, this number also affects performance. As the count of reallocated sectors increases, the read/write speed tends to become worse because the drive head is forced to seek to the reserved area whenever a remap is accessed.
Your speed issue may not have anything to do with the reallocated sectors. You may not have anything to fix. The drive has sectors in reserve that it uses to replace bad ones when it detects them. Those could even be from the factory, but it probably means it has detected quite a few bad sectors and replaced them.
You can go to Seagate and get seatools to run a long drive test, but but you should back up the data first.
GeneO
The reallocated sector count raw value is 45 and the threshold limit is 36.. which mean its 9 more than the available reserved spare space for allocation.... This could very well be scattered anywhere on the disk... and not necessary all together..
try running a file transfer on a drive with Bad sector..you will see a considerable decrease in the speed of the transfer... thats because the drive head is forced to seek the reserved area..
This drive maybe able to run for years or maybe days with these bad sectors... we cant be sure.. when it would fail...This is just an indication of an impending drive failure...
That doesn't make sense. The SMART threshold does not equal what the drive has reserved - obviously since the drive has reallocated more than the threshold. The reallocated sectors will not slow the drive down but if the drive comes across new ones it will. So if it still transfers slowly and the reallocated sector count does not increase, then the speed has nothing to do with this.
The transfer speed behavior is not abnormal IME. Transfer speed calculation often starts out optimistic as it si filling buffer space etc. then decreases. If the files are not very big, the overhead of processing each file can be significant. The data gets moved from the source to memory then from memory to the destination. It is not uncommon for copying data to see around 1/2 the maximum transfer speed of the disk in my experience.
GeneO
If you have a better solution to the user's problem... please feel free to reopen the thread by informing imeem about it...
Last edited by imeem; 04 Sep 2012 at 11:43.
Has your reallocated sector count increased?
You might try your disk read rate with HDTune (free version). It will test the rate from one end of the platter to the other.
Cheers
Last edited by GeneO; 04 Sep 2012 at 22:51.
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