I've just finishing sorting out a bunch of recycled drives. Finally

One Maxtor DiamonMax Plus 6Y160P0 drive has a SMART warning with a Reallocated sector count

Threshold: 63
Value: 238
Worst: 162
Raw: 154

after being formatted and scanned.

What is it's meaning, I've been told Reallocated sector count is one of the more important aspects of SMART. Should this drive be tossed? thanx..

all hard drive have bad sectors that included drives you buy new.

smart warning is just a early sign of the drive not up to speed its gone past its date for use

i know some people that have got smart warning and are still using the drives now


i would keep it

A reallocated sector is one that has gone bad and has been replaced with a spare.

See this article for an explanation of the SMART attributes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

In your example the raw value is the actual number of bad sectors. The normalised values (current / worst / threshold) are a kind of health indicator. The drive starts off at 253. As it develops more defects, this number falls. If it hits the threshold, then the drive is deemed to have failed.

As you can see, the value has fallen from 253 to 238, representing a loss of 15 points. The number of reallocations is now 154. That's about 10 bads for every point lost. The threshold of 63 indicates that the drive can lose up to 190 points (253 - 63), which represents about 1900 bad sectors.

Even though you still have a long way to go before a SMART failure, I wouldn't trust my data to a drive with that many bad sectors. If you insist on using it, I suggest you backup regularly and monitor the SMART report frequently. If the reallocations increase, then I would definitely retire the drive.

BTW, one thing I don't understand is why the worst value of 162 isn't equal to the current value of 238. My understanding is that this attribute should be monotonically decreasing. That is, the number of reallocations should be an increasing number throughout the life of the drive.


Worst: 162

I double checked, and the SMART values indeed looks strange. So, I ran "Hard Disk Sentinel 0.04" and it showed a Health of 26%. I also ran "Hard Disk Sentinel 0.04" on another system with MUCH older drives, a Maxtor 60GB & Maxtor 80GB which showed 100% healthy. 26% seems quite low...