Legit Reviews

Hey everyone, here I am with my monthly dumb question... ;)

The 80GTB SATA hard drive out of my little boys' computer was hanging badly, so I did some testing on it with HDD Regenerator and it shows two to three THOUSAND bad sectors, in such bad shape that after running the program a few times over the last 4 days it only regenerates 10-20 each pass, which is practically useless due to the amount of bad ones left and the time it takes to run a pass (It may just be regenerating the same few which don't stay viable, I dunno). I can look at a list of where the bad sectors are, and it shows a few at around the 4GB range, with the majority clustered randomly between the 34GB>>>48GB range. Due to not being able to afford new hard drives right now I would like to find a way to still use this drive, probably as storage for his Xvid movies I make for him. I know that running Chkdsk will take note of bad sectors and the OS will blacklist them so they won't be used anymore but I was wondering if due to the large amount of them it would be more stable if I would just repartition into two partitions with the first being between the beginning of the drive and 34GTB (and let the OS blacklist those few bad sectors), then leave unpartitioned space between 34GB>>>48GB, then a second partition after 48GB up to the end of the drive. I figure I would be losing that 14GB, but at least the OS (WinXP) wouldn't have to be dealing with the bad sectors, and still having 60GB + of usable space for short-term storage would be better than nothing...

Whaddya think?


PS this question would be moot if someone local has a SATA drive or two that they would like to sell me for cheap hint hint hint... ;)

Well. If it has bad sectors, its just going to get worse and the drive will slow WAY down.

If you can find a drive I'd just switch it out.

Well, THAT's not what I wanted to hear, but probably what I needed to hear. This drive is a Samsung out of a 2006/2007 era business class HP computer, I've got much older IDE drives that are still viable, whats up with this one going bad so fast? I'm good at pinching pennies, but pinching a hard drive just may ruin the platters... ;

Damn Thailand flooding has made new drives too expensive so I have to look for used ones that may end up with the same problems...

I bought 10 drives last month, two batches of 5 and of the 10 almost half were DOA or after using for less than a week.

I also have an IBM 50Z running DOS that still works.

Drives are touchy...

WOW...did you get them off of fleabay, or CL? I hope you got such a good deal that the 5 that were left were still worth the money you paid.

Band new off newegg. 5 Samsung, 5 western digital.

All were RMA'd and humming along nicely now.

Unbelievable! That makes me scared to buy any drives period.

Hopefully the egg covered your rmas return shipping as well as replacements! Gotta wonder whether those drives were underwater at the factory