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Reallocated Sectors Count
Hi,
I have a Microsoft SS software RAID with two hard drives. Now CrystalDiskInfo says the raw count for Reallocated Sectors Count is 2 on one HDD. I like to get some lead time so I can purchase a cheap 480 GB SSD on eBay. How bad it is it? Should I wait for the count to increase before I worry? Thanks. |
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Reallocated Sectors Count
Norm X wrote:
Hi, I have a Microsoft SS software RAID with two hard drives. Now CrystalDiskInfo says the raw count for Reallocated Sectors Count is 2 on one HDD. I like to get some lead time so I can purchase a cheap 480 GB SSD on eBay. How bad it is it? Should I wait for the count to increase before I worry? Thanks. If you see 100 Reallocated on Monday and 200 Reallocated on Tuesday, it's time to get your replacement on order. You will get a better idea, once the percentage indicator drops from 100% to 99%. At that point, you can work out "how many reallocated does 1% represent" and then you know the total pool remaining. The drives I have experience with, the raw count goes to 5000 or 5500 or so. I would expect a 10TB drive (something I don't own), has a different count limit. One of the tests I run, is an HDTune transfer rate test ("benchmark"). It could be that all the bad sectors are concentrated in one area. I find this is typically in the OS area, but it isn't always like that. The purpose of the transfer rate test, is to see if the disk health actually affects normal usage. When my OS drive became perceptibly slow, the reallocated was actually still 0, but the bad blocks were all concentrated in a 50GB width swath. And I replaced the drive right then and there. I didn't need those reallocated blocks, to turn into CRC errors (and data loss) to convince me. Reallocated counts are "thresholded", so the majority of reallocated counts are hidden from you. There could be a hundred thousand reallocated blocks, and we'd never know (except to notice the performance issue they cause). Reallocated are thresholded, so that when a hard drive is new, people won't "cherry pick" drives by returning a drive showing 2 reallocated blocks. If everyone had the technical ability to detect "perfect drives", the lineup at the return counter at the computer store, would go around the corner. So instead, the disk companies lie to us, for our own good. Reallocated, as a trouble indicator, works best if the reallocations are spread uniformly over the disk surface. But disks don't always have that pattern. Some disks, it looks like a "wear" pattern, not an "age" pattern. So transfer rate testing is just as useful as staring at the Reallocated indicator. RAID can hide the problems, depending on type. A RAID 1 mirror, the first drive ready, gets to return its read sector to the user. So the "healthy" drive can shield the truth from the RAID operator, on reads. Maybe on reads, the read data from the slow drive is never used. If the RAID is a RAID 0 stripe, the pattern may be hard to interpret (due to the stripe size, and due to which blocks HDTune is actually reading at the time). I can't offer any real hands-on advice with this, is I would not be caught dead running RAID on a home system. I have around two dozen hard drives, and all of them run simplex. As a result, all have working SMART and don't rely on passthru. And they're easy to analyze, when looking for troubles. SSDs still aren't "cheap". You only need sufficient capacity, to host a boot OS. Like, Windows 10 OS works a lot better on an SSD, and ~60GB is sufficient to satisfy an application like that. Older OSes like WinXP, they don't need the the SSD performance to get by. The smallest HDD is probably 1TB, because the platters now are that big, or a bit bigger. For the money you'd put into a 480GB SSD, surely more HDD capacity could be purchased. And for performance, the M.2 drives are pretty fast. And just recently, the marketing geniuses have decided to make 4 lane or 2 lane drives, so that they could have some "shabby cheap" M.2 to fill the pricing holes between 4 lane M.2 and the slower SATA III SSDs. To run an M.2, if the motherboard doesn't have M.2, you might need a PCIe adapter card for those. A company in Canada sells an expensive adapter, at around $100 or so, which holds *4* M.2 drives. Which might be a good option if you have a low-end desktop with limited lanes to work with. That card actually has a PCIe switch chip, to share bandwidth and make the most of a bad situation. Some cheaper Chinese adapters, they'll be a lot cheaper, but they'll be using up a precious slot to house a single M.2. Paul |
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