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How long for unreadable sector to be reallocated?

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JeremyCT

Member
Joined
Feb 26, 2009
Location
CT
OpenMediaVault reported this to me 1-2-17. 9 days later and it's still there. The RAID5 array that it's a member doesn't show as degraded. The value in ID#1 hasn't changed in that time, but neither has the value in ID#197 or ID#200. The drive is pretty new with low hours. Should I give it more time? Contact WD about possible RMA? Is there a way to trigger a re-read or re-allocation somehow? The drive is a WDC_WD30EFRX. I guess I'm trying to figure out how concerned I should really be.

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAGS VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate POSR-K 200 200 051 - 11
3 Spin_Up_Time POS--K 177 176 021 - 6116
4 Start_Stop_Count -O--CK 100 100 000 - 25
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct PO--CK 200 200 140 - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate -OSR-K 200 200 000 - 0
9 Power_On_Hours -O--CK 099 099 000 - 753
10 Spin_Retry_Count -O--CK 100 253 000 - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count -O--CK 100 253 000 - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count -O--CK 100 100 000 - 25
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count -O--CK 200 200 000 - 9
193 Load_Cycle_Count -O--CK 200 200 000 - 1579
194 Temperature_Celsius -O---K 125 109 000 - 25
196 Reallocated_Event_Count -O--CK 200 200 000 - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector -O--CK 200 200 000 - 1
198 Offline_Uncorrectable ----CK 200 200 000 - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count -O--CK 200 200 000 - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate ---R-- 200 200 000 - 2
 
I have the same drive and that particular counter is 0 after 11175 power on hours.

I'd watch it and see if it grows. I'd be more concerned if #5 starts to grow. And for reference I have a retired Seagate 2TB drive that had over 2700 remapped sectors. It still works and I use it for offline backups (that are already backed up elsewhere.)
 
To my understanding, pending sectors are only "corrected" when new data is written to the offending sector. The drive then takes the opportunity to move it to another sector. I think that counts towards reallocated sectors.

You can force it by writing to it, but without knowing where it is, you'd probably have to do the whole surface.
 
Hi @JeremyCT!

Reallocated Sector Count in SMART test is quite important as an indicator of bad sectors and a dying drive because this parameter basically means that your hard drive found a bad sector, and swapped it with a 'reserve pool' of sectors. After this swap, the medium should be free of bad sectors to the operating system. It's a technology designed to make failing sectors on the HDD cause no trouble for the operating system because it'll just swap a new one whenever it finds that a particular sector is becoming weak (because it takes more time to read that sector than normal).

However, a small number of reallocated sectors is not a serious issue, but nonetheless the situation should be monitored because the number of sectors available for replacement is limited and once that number is reached no more sectors can be "fixed".

When this number of reallocated sectors can become large then sometimes this could mean that there is usually some underlying reason for bad sectors developing and that problem is still there. Such problems are usually progressive and become more serious as time progresses, so just in case I'd suggest to make a backups should be made before trouble develops.

In case you notice that their number is starting to increase, then you can always contact our support and see if a RMA could be arranged if the drive is still under warranty (which I guess is the case here). Here's a link to our support contact:]
http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=nnurpn

Hope this helps and best of luck!
 
if it has a pending sector replace that drive. especially if its under warranty.
 
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