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General Software Discussion / Re: Checking Bad sector in HDD and ExtHDD
« on: June 26, 2012, 11:24 AM »
How much is your data worth?
How much time do you want to spend on it?
How much money do you want to spend?
Can you live with the potential failure or worry about it constantly?
It's a purely subjective decision.-4wd (June 25, 2012, 09:19 PM)
Lets say you have a HDD that starts developing bad clusters and by the time you find out the problem there is N bad clusters:
1. The number N increases rapidly. It won't wait.
2. If a a newly develop bad cluster take place on a spot where one of your Window component files or a driver - you get Blue Screen. Yes there is a chance you can run in safe mode, mark that spot bad, replace the corrupted crucial file and continue using that HDD.
3. Even when a newly bad spot corrupts a non-crucial data file, say cache file, cookies etc. You will soon find more and more program to response slower and slower... simply because quite often, an attempt to read something on a bad spot will take minutes if not hours before the system decides it is bad.
In brief, no matter what, it is not worth the trouble.
As soon as REAL bad cluster is found, trashing the HDD is a matter of affirmative and securing as much as possible data on it is an urgency... remember this:
Restoring backup to a new HDD is always easier and take much shorter time than rebuilding it from scratch.
The longer one make his/her final decision the more data will be lost and the more he/she suffers. I really can't figure out why this matter can become purely subjective?
Make it this way, even if I enjoy torturing myself, I won't choose to secure a HDD with bad sectors. I rather go with SM sex... :)