Question: After 222 days of usage my external usb drive’s S.M.A.R.T. system warned about having too many bad sectors on the disk (65537 reallocated sectors).
I tested it with badblocks -svw and no bad block were found. I re-partitioned and re-formatted drive. It seems to work just fine, but my Fedora is still complaining about the drive is dying and I that yellow exclamation sing is always shown on the notification panel.
I’m a bit confused. So here’s the questions:
Thanks.
Answer: Yes, it is.
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I tested it with badblocks -svw and no ?bad block were found
Reality check. Smart checks physical sectors. Remapped sectors are available again to the OS. Basically, you have 65537 secotrs that dioes and now live from the reserve, but your OS is not able to see them. This is why they were REALLOCATED.
How many spares there are is not determined. The disc manufacturer tells you.
Smart is not negotiable normally. it is done by the firmware. That said, what you ask for is not sensible either.Discs do not fail linearly. They wear out. They get faster killing items to the end. So, a “larger reallocatoin space” would pretty much be useless. This is like saying “hey, my tire profile is too shallow, maybe I can just drive longer”. Sur you can ignore all warnings, but at the end your tire is used up.
65537 discs are way too much for me to be comfortable with.
Given 222 days of usage, you are within warranty. Get a replacement.