Iomega HDD Reallocated sectors

Hi.
I have an external 1,5 TB Iomega Hard Drive and this program called CrystalDiskInfo is telling me that there's a problem with the reallocated sectors count.



Should i be worried ?

Thanks

 

A really quick google search found this:

Basically that explains it, it means that your drive will start to get generally slower and slower... It's not really that much of an issue, just means that you have been unplugging your drive before it is done working. Always use the 'safely remove hardware' button on the bottom taskbar. On top of that if you are using it for internal storage of your computer, not shutting down properly can cause this. It's not 'too' much to be worried about. especially if 'performance' isn't a big deal.

 

Can't see the picture because of my work firewall, but I would be getting worried and backing my data up to another drive.

I've learnt my lessons on ignoring the very earliest signs of hard drive failure.

 

There are two ways to look at this:

(1) The data on that drive isn't that important. You either have good backups, or losing that data wouldn't be a terrible loss (e.g. you're only storing torrents and movies on it - not critical data).

(2) The data on that drive is absolutely critical. I don't know what I would do if all that data were to disappear.



If you are in category (1), don't worry about it. Use the drive and run it into the ground until it dies. When it does die, just replace it.

If you are in category (2), then make a backup immediately (which you should be doing on a regular basis anyway), and replace the drive. Those errors may or may not be an indication of a failing drive. But they are not indiciations of a healthy drive. Your drive may die tomorrow, or may last you another 3 years without ever giving you a problem. But if your data is important and irreplaceable, back that data up and replace the drive with a known-good unit.

And if your data is important enough that you can't afford to lose it, and you don't have good backups, consider this your get-out-of-jail-free card that you only get once in your lifetime. Hard drives often crash unpredictably, without warning, and take out all of the data stored on them. And this is exactly when people wish they had good backups, but never bothered to set up a backup schedule. Most people who *DO* have good backups went through this process at least once, before learning their lesson and creating backups.

Don't be like them. This is your gift... your miracle from the computer gods. If you aren't already making consistent and regular backups of your irreplaceable data, start doing it today.

 

If the reallocated sector count remains stable, don't worry about it, something went wonky at one point, but it's probably fine now. If the count goes up over time, consider getting a new drive ASAP. Something is inherently wrong with the drive, whether a defective head or bad i/o processes going on, that's causing the corruption to increase. At some point, you'll either lose an important file or the entire drive will stop cooperating. Reallocation in and of itself isn't a problem, only continuing reallocation

 

Well,i have 1 TB of data that i need to back-up.Because i'm definitely in the second category you mentioned.But i don't have another 1TB of space just lying around.

So what am i supposed to do now

Thanks

So now i have 13 reallocated sectors.If that number increases,i should worry ?

 

I backup everything, and either keep the backups backed up or keep a close eye on the health of those backups. If you're concerned about losing the data, you should really already have backups in place - recovering 1TB is not fun. If your primary goes down, at least you can keep working off the backups til you have another in place. It sucks, it's not cheap, but if the data is important, good practice demands having a stable backup. Just my two cents.

 

Backup everything, wipe the drive, and replace it. If you are starting to generate reallocated events that means the disk is beginning to fail and the risk of sudden death is now much higher.

 

Consider this your gift from the hard drive gods. What you should do is get a backup process in place ASAP.

Every mechanical hard drive you ever buy *WILL* fail... it is just a question of when it fails. And when it does fail, there is nothing you can do about it except replace the dead drive, and restore from backups.

If you don't have a spare 1TB of storage lying around, then I would recommend that you go out and buy it. A spare 1.5TB - 2TB hard drive costs $60 - $80 USD. Back up your data onto that drive on a regular basis. And you can use a free backup utility, like what comes as part of Windows 7, to perform the scheduled backups without paying for additional software.

It might seem like a lot of money now. But I can promise you that you *WILL* one day use that backup, and be glad that you bought the right equipment for those backups. Everybody who has ever had a hard drive failure without a backup wishes that they could spend at least 5x that amount of money to get their data back.

 

Note: software recovery (where the program keep scraping bad sectors to try and get data back) costs between 40-150ish. A physical drive failure can be as little as 250 or so, but if the platter is physically damage and the data is mission critical, I know 500 GB drives can run upwards of $1k for cleanroom service, 1tb would be higher. $100 for a backup REALLY isn't that expensive.

 

Use something like Macrium Reflect (free program) to create a compressed image of the drive. You won't need a full 1tb of secondary storage that way. When compressed using the "high" setting, the ~250 gb of data on my laptop fits into a little over 100 gb.

You can, of course, mount the compressed image, navigate it, and copy individual files from it just as if it was an actual drive using the same software.

 

Thank you for your answers.
Honestly,i'm screwed.It will take me a while to raise 100-150 $ because i'm still in high school 3rd year.
I'll see what i can do.
Thank you again.

 

No offense, but when people say critical data, they typically mean financial, work-related, personal, or otherwise disastrous to lose. I can't recall having more than a handful of text docs in high school that I would have called critical. Even now, I wouldn't call more than 100mb critical, tbh. The rest is media fluff. Anyhow, pull the data that's most important to you off, set it aside, and don't use it until you have a backup in place. If some of that data is truly critical, ask your parents or get a smaller backup, in the 500gb or 250gb range, to save the most important stuff.

 

Agreed.

Term papers, bank statements, work projects, etc... even personal digital photos and home videos. That stuff is critical. It took you a long time to create that content the first time around, and you could re-create that content again if you lost it.

A bunch of pirated DVD rips, pirated MP3s, and pr0n isn't critical. You can always re-download that stuff if needed.

 

Really... lets face it, anything you cannot replace is critical.

Photos, Important documents, Memories, awesome game screenshots (lol!) Music doesn't really count here. Unless that is you're stupid enough to buy from iTunes and if you lose your collection well... that's it.

Anything you can download again, no matter what it is, isn't really critical. Anything that you cant replace, download or be reimbursed for is.

So yeah it's pretty self explanatory.

Taking all of that into account. I have about 500gb of 'critical' data on my computer and about 1.5Tb of non critical junk that I could lazily download again any time I please.

But not everyone is the same as me.