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Hard Drive SMART Stats - from the BackBlaze Blog

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IainB:
@4wd: Blimey. What did you do to get that result? Why does it have the Plus and Minus next to the 100% Health report? I've never seen that before.
Did you somehow set the offset to -1639, or did HDS do that? I haven't thrown away that "bad" drive of mine. If it still has life and is not deteriorating, then maybe I should put a new image on it?

Is that (writing a new image) the sort of thing @SeraphimLabs means where he writes:
...I've salvaged quite a few 'bad' devices that way, simply overwriting them repeatedly a few times to brute force trigger the remapping sequence.
-SeraphimLabs (November 20, 2014, 09:54 PM)
--- End quote ---
??
Overwriting them repeatedly is what Spinrite does, I think - except it didn't work on that particular drive of mine:
...The software was unable to run on my hardware (disk drive) - for the simple technical reason that it was not possible to effect a BIOS switch change to enable it. ...
-IainB (November 29, 2013, 08:41 PM)
--- End quote ---

4wd:
@4wd: Blimey. What did you do to get that result? Why does it have the Plus and Minus next to the 100% Health report? I've never seen that before.
Did you somehow set the offset to -1639, or did HDS do that?-IainB (November 21, 2014, 05:03 AM)
--- End quote ---

The +/- appears when you put in an offset - which you can do next to any of the S.M.A.R.T. values.

That drive is over 5 years old and still spinning its wheels.

You can run a Low Level Format a couple of times to see if the sectors get remapped, (what I usually do when a HDD starts getting flakey), or use something like MHDD.  Fill up the HDD with big files a few times, at some point it may trigger the remap if the sector gets hit enough times and produces errors.

IainB:
@4wd: Would you still recommend that:
...You can run a Low Level Format a couple of times to see if the sectors get remapped, (what I usually do when a HDD starts getting flakey), or use something like MHDD.  Fill up the HDD with big files a few times, at some point it may trigger the remap if the sector gets hit enough times and produces errors.
____________________________________
-4wd (November 21, 2014, 05:26 AM)
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Is that worth the time/effort, especially when the disk is no longer necessarily reliable?

I am asking because one of my drives got it's first #187 on 2016-06-06 and a second one on 2017-07-10, with a warning that the hard disk status had "degraded", yet it still says its Performance and Health are 100%.    :tellme:

mouser:
With the price of hard drives my opinion these days is that the first sign of the smallest amount of trouble from a drive means the data gets migrated off it and it gets put into retirement.

4wd:
@4wd: Would you still recommend that:
...You can run a Low Level Format a couple of times to see if the sectors get remapped, (what I usually do when a HDD starts getting flakey), or use something like MHDD.  Fill up the HDD with big files a few times, at some point it may trigger the remap if the sector gets hit enough times and produces errors.
____________________________________
-4wd (November 21, 2014, 05:26 AM)
--- End quote ---
Is that worth the time/effort, especially when the disk is no longer necessarily reliable?-IainB (July 16, 2017, 10:57 AM)
--- End quote ---

Depends what you mean by reliable - that particular drive is still working fine in my main computer, on for 8+ hours a day, (although not atm since I'm overseas), so it's ~8+ years old.

I regard all data on any medium as ephemeral since you have absolutely no idea when that medium is going to fail, whether the 1st or the 10,000th time it's used/switched on ... hence afaiac, every medium is unreliable.

All I can do is ensure I have spread the risk by backing up my important data across a variety of medium.

I am asking because one of my drives got it's first #187 on 2016-06-06 and a second one on 2017-07-10, with a warning that the hard disk status had "degraded", yet it still says its Performance and Health are 100%.    :tellme:
--- End quote ---

Only you can make that determination, I use a drive until it stops working.
You have to weigh up time vs money, I'll always spend the time since I have a lot of it ... money, not so much  ;D

You also have to consider what computer you're talking about here, mine are desktops with multiple drives ... system and data reside on different drives.
If you're talking about a laptop where you only have one drive generally, if it were me I'd image it, backup the data (not OS), then probably wipe the drive a couple of times, restore the image and see what happens ... but like I said, I have the time to do it and other machines I can use in the meantime.

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