I have two related issues here.
The first one is my main concern :
I had a drive whose health, from a SMART viewpoint, was deteriorating. Reallocated Sector Count would go up and Current Pending Sector would fluctuate. The drive was fairly new, but I thought OK, I just got a bad apple.
So I got a new drive (and took the chance to upgrade to an SSD Hybrid). Well, to my surprise, the same thing started occurring.
Which leads me to wonder if it is POSSIBLE (I’m not expecting a diagnose, just if it is possible) that a bad/lose cable and/or my SATA controller/firmware could be responsible for causing those bad sectors (or at least make the system believe, at a low level, that they are bad)?
The second concern is related to disk performance. I finally correlated, after months of investigation, the reason why my entire system slows down from time to time and disk activity is very high (while i am not running a backup, av scan, large file operation nor paging to disk) - it happens everytime Reallocated Sector Count goes up and can last from 1 to 10 minutes sometimes. Is it normal for this to happen when the disk is re-arranging/marking sectors as bad? Or is this another clue the my problem might be actually related to the first concern?
Thanks in advance.
Hello,
You can try using another SATA cable, but I think is improvable, that it could be the cause of your problem.
There are two types of bad sectors:
one resulting from physical damage that can’t be repaired, and one resulting from software errors that can be fixed.
- A physical — or hard — bad sector is a cluster of storage on the hard drive that’s physically damaged.
- A logical — or soft — bad sector is a cluster of storage on the hard drive that appears to not be working properly.
Windows has a built-in Disk Check tool (also known as chkdsk) that can scan your hard drives for bad sectors, marking hard ones as bad and repairing soft ones to make them usable again. If Windows thinks that there’s a problem on your hard disk (because the hard drive’s “dirty bit” is set) it will automatically run this tool when your computer starts up. But you’re also free to run this tool manually at any point.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2641432
Thanks for the reply. I’m aware of chkdsk. I’ve run it a few times. I’ve had a computer since 1983 and I’m not your basic user.
I don’t know how to derive actionable information from your reply. Are you saying that if the damage is logical it’s more likely I have a lose/faulty SATA cable? It’s a laptop, I’ve opened it, but getting to the cable is very hard without proper tools and a experience completely dissasembling laptops so I don’t want to mess with it.
Are you also saying that if thge damage is physical it’s more likely I have a faulty drive? How unlikely is it that I got two lemons in a row? Besides, the rise in bad sectors is slow and gradual over the course of months - it never spikes.
Is the only way to discover if the damage is logical or physical to make a backup and write zeros to the entire drive?
Do you know if when a sector is being marked as bad the HD goes into such a frenzy that the computer becomes unresponsive for a few minutes?
Thanks
