Hi, I would need some suggestions over an issue.
I have 2 external drives which have some bad sectors, model Samsung G2 portable of 640 GB. Both are no longer under warranty as they are more than 3 years old.
Naturally, I moved all my important data on another drives. But, since the number of bad sectors is (or, more exactly, was) not very high, several hundreds at most, I intended to keep using them (for "junk" data, which I would not care about if it is suddenly lost) until they would simply fall apart.

I had once a hard drive (internal) which showed bad sectors and I was able to use it intensively for more than 18 months after the first bad sectors appeared.
But here is a little problem: I reformatted both drives in order to have the bad sectors marked as "bad" and re-allocated. But, while the bad sectors dissappeared after the reformat, the reformatting resulted in several sections of the drives (tipically of 5-10 GB in size) becoming extremely slow.
One of the drives showed bad sectors almost 2 years ago. Reformatting removed them and no new ones appeared, but there are small parts of the drive where the writing speed slaws to a crawl (up to 1-2 MB/s). The reading speed is fine over the entire drives.
The second drive (which went bad just a week ago) again had no bad sectors after reformat anymore and its health status is labeled as ok by HDTune Pro (the tool I use for drive diagnostic), but there is at least one part of the drive where the reading speed, this rime, becomes very slow. The part is at the position 48-54 GB on HDTune's drive map and the reading speed slows down there to 4-5 MB/s. The writing speed is fine over the entire drive.

Is there any way to fix this? Not to repair the damaged sector (that is pretty much impossible most of the time), but at least to mark the slower sections so that Windows won't try to write there.
The drives are still usable; the first which went bad had been stable for more than a year with constant usage, but this speed problem can become irritating when you hit the faulty sections.

Any ideas?

PS: Let's make something clear. I know the drives can't be trusted anymore, that they could fail and I got some replacements. I'm not going to keep any important data on it (not that I actually much important data to begin with).
But I intend to keep them around as long as they will last - and I want to see how to squeeze the best performance still possible out of them until they completely fail.

So to recapitulate:
- bad sectors showed up;
- they dissappeared after a low-level format;
- but the low-level format resulted in slow speeds over some small sections of the drives;
- the speed problems are assymetrical: one drive experiences bad writing speed, but the reading speed is fine; the other drive experiences the opposite: bad reading speed (for instance, over a portion of about 6 GB between 48-54 GB on the HD Tune Drive map), but writing speed is fine.

I don't want to ditch them completely (YET) until I see them crash - moreso since I'm not certain how badly the drives are affected. One of them I have been able to use it continously for almost 2 years by now, with no data loss and no problems except the occassional drop in writing speed. In addition, the diagnostic tools I've used gave me some conflicting information - Windows chkdsk said everything is fine, HDD Regenerator found delays, but not bad sectors, HDD Tune Pro found errors in the reading test, but not in the writing test.

If there is no way to work around this speed issue, I want to ask if there is a way to create a partition specifically in the affected areas of the drives, which I will mark as bad and not use.

The Search returned way to many results. Could you provide a link or give some more details what is this Samsung Burn In?



Nah, they lived their life, not gonna pay for them anymore. What I can still get from them myself, fine, if I can't, then they can rest in peace.

Nothing you can do on your own or even with obscure stuff anyway . Note that any discussion aout using either pirate and copyrighted/restricted stuff is not welcome.

What Exact drive is inside the G2 enclosure ?

p.s. as you have beaten it with homebrew solutions like hddreg maybe if there was something wrong with surface now the problem is worse. Good luck.

Nothing you can do on your own or even with obscure stuff anyway . Note that any discussion aout using either pirate and copyrighted/restricted stuff is not welcome.

What Exact drive is inside the G2 enclosure ?

p.s. as you have beaten it with homebrew solutions like hddreg maybe if there was something wrong with surface now the problem is worse. Good luck.

Huh? What pirate or copyrighted/restricted stuff?

And I'm not actually hell bent on trying to repair it (I considered that that is likely impossible). I would like to know if there is a way to create a partition in that specific area of the disk, which will then remained unused and marked as bad.

Then it is simple : use Windows disk management or FDISK under Dos. If it is sufficient ...