Re: About USB hard drives and errors

[Florian Kulzer <florian.kulzer+debian@icfo.es>]

On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 08:45:26 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 2010-04-10 02:20, Clive McBarton wrote:

[...]

> >Every HD that is even remotely close to being usable will always have
> >zero bad blocks when seen from outside the HD. All HDs have error
> >recognition and error correction and automatic replacement of faulty
> >sectors with spare ones. A HD will only show bad blocks after all of its
> >remapping area is used, at which point it is far beyond being usable.
> >
> >In other words, scanning for bad blocks on a HD cannot work.
> >
> >You can see the internal count of the remapped sectors with SMART, as
> >others have already pointed out here.
> 
> Interesting.  So what is /badblocks/ for,

I would say it is useful to make the drive access every single block;
afterwards you can check in the SMART log if that caused any remappings. 

>                                           and should it be removed
> in order to remove useless complexity?

I would not consider a command-line utility that can simply be ignored
to be useless complexity.

-- 
Regards,            |
          Florian   |