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After a hard drive fail (lots of corrupted sectors) I reformat it, but the drive give me no confidence to use it in production.

  1. Is there a tool to stress test so I know I can use it?
  2. In which ways would you use the drive so if it fails again you don't end up with data loss?
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The problem is that if a drive has failed you once, you can't trust it. In almost every case, the value of the data you are proposing to store, plus the potential costs of loss or recovery if that data gets lost, exceeds the cost of a new drive.

If the data you are proposing to store has any value to you at all, don't use the drive. Buy a replacement.

I might consider using it in a RAID-1 if I was desperate, and even then probably only for 100% scratch (ie local working storage on a compute node).

The alternative is to convince yourself you have a controller issue, and that's why the disk got corrupted. If you buy another disk and almost immediately have the same problems, then that's possible, and you can probably use the first disk in another computer.

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    +1. Disks are cheap. Once it's failed once I wouldn't trust it with any data I didn't mind losing.
    – theotherreceive
    Jul 13, 2009 at 14:14
  • +1 Disks are WAY too cheap to be bothered with a failed drive. Just to clarify though, some people think a "failed drive" is when some file goes missing, gets corrupted, or some other "voodoo". I know of at least one situation where a business was going to replace an entire PC (and HDDs) because they had a virus that wiped out some Windows system files. Best Buy told them it was a "bad hard drive". ;-)
    – KPWINC
    Jul 13, 2009 at 16:00
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    This is why it's important to run a low-level diagnostic against the drive to make sure there isn't just some fluke corruption. Simply tossing the disk without diagnosing the true problem doesn't make a lot of sense.
    – Russ Warren
    Jul 13, 2009 at 16:06
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    When Best Buy is a business's tech support, that tells you a lot already.
    – David
    Jul 13, 2009 at 16:35
  • seriously, who the heck is desperate enough to use a failed hard drive... ever?
    – Keith
    Jul 17, 2009 at 19:02
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I like to run SpinRite on semi-defunct drives just to see if they're worth anything. It takes quite a while, but it's worth it in the long run.

See here: http://www.grc.com/intro.htm

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RMA it under warranty!

I can't believe no one has said that yet.

It probably has a 3 or 5 year warranty. Send it back and get a new one (or refurb). Don't be afraid of refurbs. Many drives get returned to the mfg with zero trouble (BIOS problems, software scrambled the data, bad controller, funky software RAID, etc).

Whatever drive you have, new or refurb, check for bad sectors.

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    Just as long as you know there's nothing particularly sensitive on the drive.
    – Brad Ackerman
    Jul 13, 2009 at 19:38
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    Good point, Brad! DBAN comes in handy here, since we are assuming the drive is still somewhat usable (according to the question).
    – kmarsh
    Jul 13, 2009 at 19:53
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If a drive has lost data, the best way to get some use of it is take it apart, and extract the magnets. They make great fridge magnets.

Hard drives are cheap, it's not worth taking a chance.

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    +1 for the magnet comment. They are SERIOUSLY STRONG magnets and a lot of fun. Be careful though, they're extremely brittle as well.
    – KPWINC
    Jul 13, 2009 at 15:55
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    If you don't remove them from the metal plate, they're strong enough and shaped right to hold up things like oven mitts. On the oven, not the fridge, but the idea is the same.
    – chris
    Jul 13, 2009 at 21:55
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In which ways would you use the drive

  • Paperweight
  • Doorstop
  • Pull it apart and have fun with the magnets
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  • I've also used them as coasters and monitor stands
    – BeowulfNode42
    Nov 8, 2016 at 0:19
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Better than just reformatting would be to overwrite the whole disk with data. Then the drive has a chance to remap flaky sectors with spare ones.

You could check the reallocation count in the SMART data (e.g. with smartmontools) before and after overwriting to get an idea how many sectors were bad. You should also check regularly to see if the reallocation count went up.

In theory formatting the disk should be enough to make sure that new data is written to disk but I wouldn't trust that some tool wouldn't try to read an "unused" sector and tripped over a read error. Also its nice to know the amount of bad sectors beforehand.

If you don't trust the disk any more use it in some kind of RAID setup i.e. in a mirror or RAID5. Not trusting a single disk is always a good idea ;-)

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  • +1 for mentioning smartmontools.
    – kmarsh
    Jul 13, 2009 at 17:39
  • At the very least, it would ensure that no sensitive data was on the drive for someone else to recover, after you had thrown it out.
    – Ernie
    Jul 13, 2009 at 19:15
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Never trust a failed disk in a RAID array. Ever.

I had this happen to me plenty of times, I didn't bothering setting up Nagios to monitor the hard drives SMART status and hard drives kept reporting failures (plead guilty for not doing any or not knowing actually) but nothing would happen to the server, it would remain up and working.

Until the hard drive really starts pucking up. The whole RAID array starts getting corrupted instead, happened with 3Ware and Adaptec controllers, then I end up having to fsck the file system with a lot of corrupted files, which seemed like an eternity when the clients are begging for the server to be back.

So I really would recommend just using it somewhere that you don't care about your data, or if the hard drive is not that old, RMA it. Both Seagate and WD have impressive RMA procedures and you usually get a refurbished hard drive, sometimes with even bigger capacity.

However, don't touch Seagate hard drives. I have lost all my trust in them, I have had a good 25% failure rate of those hard drives, from different distributors too. NS or AS version, they all failed. I have been using WD RE3 and it's been great.

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Yah, disks are so cheap now. It all depends on how critical the data stored on it is. I might just use as a secondary backup or just a scrap drive. Personaly, I would not risk any data stored primarily on it. I have had too many disks crash to ever care about unreliable drives again.

Once I know a drive gives me issues, the sledge hammer of justice delivers!

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If you can boot from a CD or USB stick, I suggest you try GRC's SprinrRite

not free, but IMHO well worth the price!

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If you use *nix, do a dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/disk on the disk a few times and see if SMART or syslog gives anything.

Disks are so cheap these days, just go and get yourself a new one. :)

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  • This doesn't check the drive (directly) but destroys it through overwrites. You could test a read cycle (using "dd if=/dev/disk of=/dev/null") and not destroy the data.
    – Mei
    Jan 13, 2011 at 22:09
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You may want to look into SpinRite, which does many different things related to hard drives.

You could also grab a drive fitness test disk from the drive manufacturer to see if any errors show up. The Seagate and Maxtor tools are here, for example.

As for using the drive, you could use it as scratch space where nothing is stored permanently, or just use it on a system where you know everything is backed up somewhere else.

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If a disk even looks like it might fail, you need to toss it and get a new one ASAP. HDD's are probably one of the top two components most likely to fail in a running system (the other being cheap crappy power supplies in my experience). Unless the data on the disk is absolutely worthless, you need to replace it with a new disk. (eg you are using it as a temporary cache/proxy, and you don't care if you lose the data or not)

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  • I can't think of any situation where corrupted data would be allowable (swap? corrupted binaries... cache? corrupted entries...). You don't "lose" data (unless the metadata goes bad) - you get corrupted data.
    – Mei
    Jan 13, 2011 at 22:10
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The value of the data is worth a new drive. Unless you absolutely have no budget for a new drive, id go and get a new one.

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