Hello!

Sorry if this starts as a noob thread but I didn't find a specific answer in this forum and the Internet. I have 2 Raptors, one has 5 and the other one has 10 reallocated sectors. These are of corse invisible to any surface check tool. After thinking of WD's TLER (time-limited error recovery) I thought that maybe these or some of these sectors are still usable and therefore a future RAID 0 array without performance hits, caused by the spare sectors, might be possible. I've used the erase and scan&repair function of MHDD, but except for two brown blocks (one has been fixed), it didn't help (or SMART status is not up to date?).
Should I lowlevel format it with your Low Level Format Tool? Or is this only of help for "classic" bad sectors, seen by any scan tool?

Thanks in advance!

Drive handles reallocated sectors by itself. Since drive works and are 'invisible', sleep at night. But make backups or you'll meet one of us in person...

Thanks for your comments. The drives are empty and can be cleaned completely. I need just performance and possible data loss is not a matter here.
Would you recommend me a tool to clear the G-List?

If you care about performance / reliability, then don't buy crappy drives. The price is not the 1st thing to have in mind in this case.

I didn't realize that the G-List has of corse something to do with firmware... LOL

Well, thanks a lot for your help. If it can't be done with a freeware tool it is not worth it.

Just curious, why do you BlackST think the Raptors (or WD drives generally) are crappy? I think they are the most reliable drives for desktop use, although they have reallocated sectors (which I havn't noticed until a casual SMART readout).

I didn't mean that only WD drives reallocate sectors, but its "unique technology" T.L.E.R. (Raptor WDxxxGD and RE/RE2/RE3 series) let the drive remap sooner before irritating the RAID controller and drop the disk from the array.

Sure, desktop drives are cheap and not nearly as relieable as SCSI drives, but do use expensive SCSI controllers with SCSI drives in your private desktop? (I admit I use a AMCC SATA RAID controller, and the Raptor drives were also more expensive than regular drives - but not as expensive as SCSI - kind of best of both worlds)

Wd are the Dr guys best friends... I use Samsung anyway.