Storage Solutions Is it possible to use hdd with bad sectors?

6pack

6pack

ex-Mod
My 3TB Toshiba is out of warranty. The bad sectors are at around the 1.5TB - 2TB mark. Windows and Linux both hang / crash while accessing or reading/writing to that part.

Can I use the disk for temporary dumping of data to the good parts while partitioning off the bad part only?
Is it possible? Will the data copied to the good part go bad? What I want to do is copy data off network drive temporarily to this disk (since network copy speed is around 14-15MBps) and then copy from this disk to usb 3 disk at 90MBps at once (after I copy around 1TB or so data).

I'll be using this with linux os, and its already formatted to an ext4 GPT partition.
 
Can you do it? - Sure
Should you do it? -That's up to you. I certainly wouldn't save anything to a drive like that which isn't backed up somewhere else.
 
Do a full format of the disk, Windows should mark those sectors as bad and wont write on them, I have done this before, Also after dumping data there might be some files on accessing them the system would freeze, Mark those files and dont touch them. YOur disk would work for good amount of time. I have a 160gb wd about 11 years old. Still works. Use it for occasional testing however. I have also found that if the sectors caused without any physical damage to the disc then inverting the disc and using it reduces the chances of bad sectors.

Different hdd's behave differently your situation could be different, What i said might work or might not work. Test and let us know :)
 
Yes, you can use the HDD. What I did earlier was to use a HDD utility to scan the disk, while also telling the approx sector it was scanning. I would make a note of the sector and with a 10% incremental, partition off that area and not write to it. My HDD was being used 24x7 as a download disk, and worked for about 2 years after which I stopped using it. Still have the disk though!
 
Back
Top