For a system like this, you really do want to do a 'burn in' period, IMO for at least a couple weeks, where the system is not being depended upon. If you've got an environment with only a few servers with dedicated roles, having a new 'production server' go tits up is a very bad thing. Given enough systems, with homogeneous roles, it doesn't matter: if it starts to fail, you pull it and put another one in. To a degree, you can rule with certainty that everything is working. Still, SpinRite is the only program that I know of that can do a controlled read/write pattern test and modify the underlying file system when needed. (You would be surprised, moving some disks and their ISA controllers to a faster system would actually require a higher interleave, slowing them down incredibly until SpinRite was run) Modern IDE drives also have hidden reserved space for 'spare' tracks and space where they store their firmware, which likewise never gets tested or re-written.Īdditionally, on MFM/RLL drives SpinRite could use low-level formatting to optimize the sector interleave for the specific system. Modern IDE drives don't allow low-level formatting, and as far as I know, even re-writing the user content of the drive does not re-write sector header data.

Back in the day I witnessed many times when SpinRite would completely recover bad sectors, presumably damaged by electrical/controller issues rather than physical surface issues, and a full pattern test would prove the space was safe to use. This ensured every last magnetic 1 and 0 was re-written to the disk. Back in the days of MFM/RLL drives, SpinRite could perform a 'low level' format on each track. >Still works 100% as HDD tech is still the same They're counting on you not finding a problem soon enough. you'll just hit performance problems and put yourself closer to warranty cutoff time.

You have to make the drive find them and map around them because it won't happen in the factory. There are bad sectors on your brand new drive. For later runs we expect to see a more consistent fill time and the relocated sector count stop climbing so alarmingly fast. We expect the first two or three runs to take longer (EVERY drive these days will have relocations going on for the first few runs). What eventually happens with a bad drive is that the SMART counter ticks over to some magical number and starts reporting health issues (A requirement for some RMA processes). We do this 5 to 10 times (depending on how soon we need the drives). We 'test' our drives by filling them with whatever data we have laying around. then your drive is F***.I.N.G slow for now apparent reason.

A drive can remap a difficult sector without you ever knowing unless you look there.Įxcept when it happens a lot.

Spinrite 6 hard disk size limit