bad Sector Issues

G

greenT

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heya guys

can anyone explain to me how bad sectors develop on a hard drive?
 
thanks for the link squirrel, but i find wikipedia to be very unreliable seeing as anyone could be editing it and writing complete rubbish if they want to. do you know of any other sites like official computer hardware sites where i can investigate further?
 
A mate of mine said that its caused by not defragging your hard drive often enough. Is this true?
 
A bad sector is a physical defect on the media. Has nothing to do with defragging.
Back in the day yes, with Windows 3.11 there was an issue where DEFRAG led to corruption, especially with certain BIOSes and large drives.

These defects usually occur after running the drive at elevated temperatures, dropping the drive, exceptionally dusty environments, and sometimes old age.

A drive recently failed in one of my servers. It was just a month over 10 years old. It was one of the first ULTRA-ATA drives on the market back then. I recovered all I could off that drive, then I opened it and you could see the damage- a dust particle got under one of the heads and the platter was visibly worn.
 
ok the dust part i get, but surely if your computer is kept out of sunlight and it has a built in fan thats supposed to cool the hard drive then it cant be caused form heat. Also you said that bad sectors have absoultuely nothing to do with defragging? just want to make sure so that i can stop my mate from giving anyone else bad advise. Also would a progam that is constantly defragging not cause too much wear and tear on the disk? just some thought please correct me if they are silly :)
 
can anyone help me with an answer to my last post, im still a bit confused about the wear ad tear on the disk part.
 
wear and tear is usually not much of an issue for a disk drive. I've achieved just over 10 years of service from Seagate drives used in busy mail servers. Defragging was not an issue for me as I used Linux all that I needed was the occasional fsck to fix things cocked up by Eishkom's infamous loadsheddings.

Temperature is a bad thing for a hard disk, that and mechanical shock!
 
thanks for the reply Turiko it does help my confusion, guessing issues concerned with defragging are not very popular on this forum, took ages to get a reply. if your computer is out of sunlight will the built in fan be enough to keep it cool or what other things will cause my hard drive to over heat?
 
how can a shutdown of any kind whether directly or not be the cause of a drive overheating? its beyond logic

rofl

dtk man
 
Turiko is right. Generally, new bad sectors are exposed by thermal issues ... either running the drive too hot, or through thermal cycling, ie the expansion and contraction cycles caused by powering on and powering off. That's one of the reasons why I never power off my PCs.
 
ok so then will it be a good idea to restart my coputer after every defrag or will it not make a difference?
 
Turiko said:
wear and tear is usually not much of an issue for a disk drive. I've achieved just over 10 years of service from Seagate drives used in busy mail servers. Defragging was not an issue for me as I used Linux all that I needed was the occasional fsck to fix things cocked up by Eishkom's infamous loadsheddings.

Temperature is a bad thing for a hard disk, that and mechanical shock!
Click to expand...

Interesting - you think temperature "wobbles" might cause microscopic cracks to appear in the magnetic medium - which leads to bad sectors?

Makes sense...
 
microscopic cracks!!!! is that what bad sectors really are? now i understand why they are not caused by defragging!
 
i was just wondering...if my computer is taking much longer to boot up than it used to does that mean there are bad sectors on the boot up sction of my computer, or could it be something else?
 
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