How many bad sectors are allowable

[KSquared]

On a new hard drive, how many bad sectors would be allowed before the drive would be considered to be defective? Also, do these sectors continue to go bad, or is it that they fail quickly or else they last for the life of the disk? I don't know if it makes any difference, but the drive is from Maxtor.

[Player0]

Bad sectors happen once in a while, especially on older drives. A few isn't necessarily something to worry about. However, if you keep getting new ones, theres a problem with the drive and it is probably on its way out.

Is the hard drive making funny noises by any chance? If so, thats a sure sign of a bad drive. If not, you may actually be okay. The bad sectors were maybe just a manufacturing flaw, or happened because the drive was bumped while running.

[mackerel]

On a new drive, you shouldn't see any bad sectors. During the manufacturing process, they map out bad sectors leaving what appears to be an error free disk. Some spare sectors are kept back so that if new bad blocks are discovered, they can be mapped out with good ones.

I haven't had a Matrox, but the other manufacturers (Seagate, WD, IBM) have downloadable diagnostic tools. This does a scan to see if there are bad sectors, and if so they can try to repair them by mapping spare good sectors in. You can give that a try, but be careful as the repair will likely require the drive to be wiped.

[Old sptw]

Hi KSquared.

As Player0 said, bad sectors happen once in a while, especially on older drives.The true "Bad sectors" are caused by defective surface magnectical problems.This "Bad Sectors" that we can see on the new drivers (IBM is one of them on a GXP series (60 and 75 only), sometimes are caused by softwares and can completely to be recuperate.This situation occurs when the system disconnect excessively fast, before the HD can transfer the content of cache to the midia.Sometimes it happens by others causes too, as a PSU, Controllers, Operacional System and mainly by excessive Heat. When it occurs, you get an error named "Write Splice", or a bad clusters, corrupted programs, loss of dates.......On the middle of the sector does not have to occur write splice, only in the beginning and in the end of this, exactly because the head of the hd makes the search in this way, and only after finding the correct sector, occurs the writing operation.A write splice however, can occur in the middle of a sector, then you got an error..The weird noise that sometimes you can hear from your hd is the head of the drive try to search the sector, and this operation is very fast(then, the noise).This is not caused by a component specifies and it is not a signal of a defective system or defective drive.In the most of the times an “Erase Disk Tool “ can fix the problem.Maxtor have a toll named PowerMax (http://www.maxtor.com) .This utility is effective for a Potential hard drive surface problems (e.g., bad clusters, bad sectors, partitioning/formatting problems, etc.), drive recognition problems (e.g. hard drive that is not recognized by the operating system) and others too..Be aware that this operation (Erase Disk) will erase all your data.Make a backup before.
Well, there is a little chance too, that your drive is a defective component, and in this case, PowerMax will tell it for you.Then you can use your warranty and make a RMA on it.

I hope this help you.

[KSquared]

Thanks for that information about the hard drive. I'll be trying your suggestion once I can get all the data backed up.