Re: dell laptop behaving badly

Hi!

I thought I read that hard drives even from the factory have
a few bad sectors usually.

They do. As Ben pointed out, it is impossible (or at least very
unlikely) to produce a disk surface that is completely perfect. So,
when the manufacturer is preparing the drive, they program out all the
bad spots by putting them in a "permanent defects list". You never see
these.

If a drive gains a bad spot, it is something that should be paid
attention to. However, it isn't necessarily a reason to write off an
entire drive. Sometimes something isolated goes wrong inside the
drive. In this case, the drive can pull down a good spare once its
controlling electronics are convinced that the spot is bad. This can
be done with manufacturer-supplied diagnostics. The GRC SpinRite
utility will also do it.

When a drive starts gaining more bad spots, or has come to the point
where it can no longer map out bad spots with good spares...then it is
time to back up.

Something else you might be interested in is SMART data. It is true
that some drives have failed while reporting perfect SMART health, but
that is not a terribly common failure method. Oftentimes, drops in any
of the SMART parameters that a drive is capable of reporting should be
taken seriously.

Some system BIOSes monitor SMART data coming from hard drives. Others
ignore it. Still more can ignore or monitor it based on the user's
choice. Nearly all will only complain that a drive is failing based on
SMART data when things have already gotten pretty far out of hand. You
can monitor your own hard drive's SMART data with a tool like SpeedFan
(http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php).

William
.

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