One isn’t “fixing” a bad sector on a hard drive. What one is doing (in simplistic terms) is marking the sector as bad and using a backup/reallocated sector in its place. The issue comes there is a finite number of backup/reallocated sectors and once those are used up replacing bad sectors, the data gets corrupted, SMART throws errors and the drive has problems as additional bad sectors arrise. Like indicated previously trying to reassign bad sectors is a temporary fix at best, the drive is still failing. One can use their favorite internet search engine to search for repairing bad hard drive sectors or removing bad sectors. There are some basic free tools (Windows chkdsk for example) out there along with paid software like HDD Regenerator. Personally while I have recover the use of the drive for a short time, it always fails eventually. Sometimes within hours of running recovery tools, sometimes days or weeks later. But in the end the drive always ends up being replaced.
The My Cloud Home uses a different operating system than the My Cloud line. It has different features and different options. For example no Dashboard and no SSH capability. It’s operating system is, as I understand it, Android. Configuration of the unit is done using (again as I understand it) a mobile app.
If you are worried about the issue being with the My Cloud backplane hardware and not the drive itself one can always take a spare unused bare hard drive and unbrick it to work in the My Cloud. I’ve run drives as small as 250GB in a first gen single bay My Cloud enclosure some may have even run smaller drives. Currently using an old laptop’s 2.5 inch 750GB drive in the single bay My Cloud as its a secondary hardly used NAS device now that I use a larger, more capable, unit from another manufacturer.
It comes down to the issue of time and effort. Sure one can spend hours/days trying to repair a failing hard drive, but in the end you still have a failing drive that could fail completely at any time. Or one can spend some money to simply replace the failing drive by spending a little bit of time (half an hour to an hour) on top of the new drive cost unbricking a brand new (or existing used) hard drive for use in the single bay My Cloud.
