Re: M-Audio: PCI or USB?

Scott Dorsey wrote:
Riccardo Rubini <rubini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

As far as I know, there are no borked sectors on my hard drive. It's
a pretty new hard drive, it's actually a 1:1 replacement for another
one that died recently and I did backup just in time.

There are lots of bad sectors on your hard drive. Life is just like
that. The drive controller marks them for you and everything is fine.

I don't want to fathom your divinatory ability, but you are wrong - at
least, partly wrong. At the moment, there are no bad sectors on my hard
drive. Whilst it's true the drive controller remaps bad sectors to spare
ones, transparently to the user, a very mundane package - for those in the
know, of course - called "Smartmontools" can make a difference between
reality and Nostradamus-like prophecies or simply false assumptions.

Indeed, when bad sectors are marked bad and remapped somewhere else, the
SMART log of your hard drive - all my hard drives support SMART and I guess
99.9% of modern hard drives do the same, nowadays - will reflect that.
Luckily, at the moment I have no report of bad sectors. Surprised? Is it a
matter of time? Maybe, but for the moment, you are still wrong.

If command line tools are too difficult for you, you can use some tools from
Acronis, which have the eye candy and easyness of Windows applications,
whilst running on top of DOS. If you like low-level tools like me, there are
of course specific tools, usually running from plain good ole' DOS, that can
give you that information as well; an example is PowerMax for Maxtor hard
drives or SeaTools for Seagate ones. If a scan ran by the manufacturer's
tool does not report any bad sectors, you simply don't have bad sectors;
it's not something you _must_ have, there is no "lots of them" assumption -
if bad sectors on your hard drive are so many to fall in the "lots of"
category, odds are your hard drive is already falling apart and you should
long for a new one.

Windows' CHKDSK will not reflect the controller's remapping because such
management is meant to be transparent to the Operating System, as I already
said. Usually when Windows starts to detect errors, it means the hard disk
is close to the end of the road: the overall surface's reliability is gone.

Riccardo


.

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