[vox-tech] Bad blocks on my hard drive

[Alex Mandel]

On 05/24/2011 05:30 PM, Chanoch (Ken) Bloom wrote:
> I discovered bad blocks on my laptop hard drive today -- the laptop is
> nearly 6 years old. I ran e2fsck -c the drive to mark the bad blocks as
> bad, and everything seems to be working now.
> 
> How long do I have before I need to replace the hard drive and/or
> laptop?
> 
> --Ken

By my rule of thumb for data you care about you are way past the time
(1-3 years past time).

Disclaimer this is simply how I've decided to do things, follow at your
own risk, none of it is based on real data.
If it's data you care about a lot my replacement schedule is 3 years, if
it's stuff that exists all over the place in backups and isn't a pain to
restore 5-6 is fine. If it's the family computer in the living room with
random everyday stuff and you have a backup of the important parts, run
it till it dies.

Keep in mind I'm actually referring to number of hours running,
start/stops. If you read up on smartctl you can get both those figures
out of your drive and calculate how many years it's actually been
running and how many times it's parked and started up again (depending
on the drive there is a known upper limit it was designed for). If
you've gone over the 3-5 yr window or over the rated number of
starts/stops get a new one and toss the old one into something as a
scratch disk.

I wouldn't exactly say just because you have some bad blocks the drive
is dead, all drives accumulate those over time and your disk just tends
to hide them from you and use some of it's reserve blocks in place(so I
hear). It's when you have a large amount (>5% of your disk?), or the
rate of growing blocks is noticeable that I'd get off the couch and do
something.

Enjoy,
Alex