WD6401AALS - Repair Bad Sectors?

Hi,

I purchased a used WD6401AALS and after using Data Lifeguard to do a quick test, full write of zeros, and then extended test, it said bad sectors were found after the extended test completed. It then ask, do you want to repair? To which I clicked ,yes. It said it the repair was successful and I then shut down the computer as it was late. Turned it on again the next day and ran full write zeros and a extended test again, but this time no errors were reported.

SMART tests in Data lifeguard are passes, is it going to die or “fixed” for now?

No bad sectors were reported the for the second test because you selected the option to repair them. If it passed the test then you shouldn’t worry.

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Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

But were those secors really “repaired” or just reallicated / blocked off?

Yes, bad sectors come in two flavors, Physical & Logical Bad Sectors. Physical bad sectors cannot be repaired, but if DLG finds a logical bad sector it will attempt to repair it. If you ran the test again and it did not report any bad sectors then you should not worry.  

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Hi,

So Physical Bad Sectors would be reported at the end of every Data Lifegaurd Extended Scan if they drive had them?

Just intested to know, what are logical bad sectors and how are they repaired?

As you say, if a bad physical sector is found it will be marked and reallocated. You can check the “Reallocated Sector Count” on the SMART Drive information. To see this information, on the DLG UI right click on your drive and select the “Show SMART drive info”.

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Here is a image of the SMART report. Not too sure how to read these though…

Hi again, sorry for the delay, if you check the “Offline unrecoverable sector count” and the “Reallocated sector count”, both show the same number for “Value” and “Worst”, so no physical unrecoverable sectors have been found. You can read more about  this in the DLG SMART help file.

"For WD drives, the normalized attribute value will range from 1 to 100 or 1 to 200, depending on the attribute.  Error rate, total spin ups, spin up retries and calibration retries attributes are implemented as during normal operation (“on-line”); whereas, Multi-zone Error Rate test is performed “off-line”.  This test performs a read-verify-all operation and calculates an error rate.  These Attributes are updated and stored in the drive’s reserved area.  Also stored on the drive is a set of Attribute Thresholds that correspond to the calculated Attribute Values. An impending degrading or faulty condition is indicated when the calculated Attribute Value becomes less than or equal to its corresponding Attribute Threshold value. "