Aww, I hate it when a hard drive fails - ouch!
But, correct,
SpinRite is just a tool, offering:
data recovery in place,
and
drive maintenance.
When ANY program 'refreshes' any sector, and
that sector then reads back OK, there is no way,
contemporaneously, to know if that sector will
really be good or not in the future.
In the early days of low level formatting, drive
maintenance programs built a database of bad
sectors-turned-good, and the programmers
created a threshold over which the program
stopped turning them good over and over, and
instead started leaving them marked as bad
even though they were recoverable.
Nowadays, drives maintain themselves, so all a
recovery-and-maintenance program can do is
ask and report, but the drive is ultimately the
boss.
In the opening post's case, yeah, the drive
seems untrustworthy.
That is a decision we must make as users.
That is not a decision that SpinRite or any
program can make, especially if the data comes
back, and the sector 'passes' a re-write and
re-read test.
When in the future that sector will fail, if ever,
is not information that is available to SpinRite
or any program.
Everything fails sometime, though I have
40-year-old drives that suggest otherwise.
We ask for SpinRite logs because there is
information that others see that the user may
not be sensitive to, such as drive make, model,
interface, attachment, timing, and other
details which we can compare to our own
experience.
"...
a 2TB drive that I had taken out of my
StableBit DrivePool, because StableBit Scanner
told me there were about 3,500 unreadable
sectors ..."
Let me Google this for us:
Q: Google, what is StableBit DrivePool,
StableBit Scanner?
A: StableBit DrivePool and StableBit Scanner
are two distinct software tools developed by
StableBit for managing and monitoring hard
drives.
DrivePool creates a single virtual drive from
multiple physical drives, allowing for file
duplication and easy data management.
Scanner monitors the health of hard drives,
performing surface scans and file system
checks to detect potential issues early on.
Here's a more detailed look at each:
StableBit DrivePool:
• Disk Pooling: Combines multiple physical
hard drives into a single, large virtual drive.
• File Duplication: Allows for redundant
storage of files across multiple drives,
protecting against data loss from drive
failures.
• File Management: Automatically moves
data from failing drives to healthy drives,
simplifying data migration.
• Flexibility: Supports various drive types and
sizes and can be easily expanded as needed.
StableBit Scanner:
• Disk Health Monitoring: Regularly checks
SMART data and performs surface scans to
identify potential drive problems.
• Surface Scanning: Detects unreadable sectors
on hard drives, helping to prevent data loss.
• File System Check: Ensures the integrity of
the file system, identifying potential corruption.
• Early Warning System: Alerts users to
potential drive failures, allowing for timely
data backup and drive replacement.
In essence, DrivePool provides a way to create
a large, resilient storage pool, while Scanner
provides a way to monitor and maintain the
health of the drives within that pool.
StableBit's web site claims:
"... Continuously scans all of your hard drives,
ensuring that every precious bit remains
readable ..."
That sounds like it does
on-line and
in-real-time what SpinRite does
off-line.
"...
those same sectors have become unreadable
again. Unfortunately, this time they contained
files, and those files were lost ..."
Sounds like a a failure of StableBit to fulfill
their promise to make sure there was a backup.
"...
I am unwilling to run SR again ..."
Is unrelated, because the drive is no longer
used for data, so you can run SpinRite on it
forever now, uninterrupted.
So use the 'bad' drive for testing, use it to
learn about the drives, and use it to learn
about the tests.
Essentially, you are testing the drives, and you
are testing StableBit, as well as testing SpinRite.
And SpinRite can help by providing on outside
look by which to compare.
And then run SpinRite on all the other drives,
and especially run SpinRite on any drive that is
new to you so you can get a sense of both of
their behaviors doing what they promises to
do - write and read back data.
By watching the screens, and reading the
details, we see if sectors are slow, if there are
a lot of error corrections to produce the
promised data storage density ( though
Seagate seems to use ECC differently ).
Hence I run SpinRite Level 5 on all drives new
to me before I use them, so I know what to
compare to as they age over time and I retest
later.
- - - - -
And about StableBit's "...
checks SMART data ..."
... everybody knows that S.M.A.R.T. is incredibly
stupid, and so, StableBit ought to know, too,
so there's that.
I have drives that are so overwhelmed with
self-ECC data recovery that they read at
5 MB / second, yet produce no S.M.A.R.T.
errors.
I have drives that sing along at full speed,
reliable for years, yet have critical S.M.A.R.T.
errors on boot that warn that drive failure is
imminent.
Just about the only thing S.M.A.R.T. is reliably
good for is temperature, and yet, some drives
are crappy at reporting that, and some are
even hard-coded to report appropriate drive
temperature regardless of having no
temperature chips, so there's that.
StableBit, and Backblaze, and others say they
depend on S.M.A.R.T., yet we all know
S.M.A.R.T. has nothing to offer that is
dependable.
- - - - -
So, what 2 TB drive was that?
And please do share the SpinRite log so we all
can learn.
Also run free ValiDrive
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm on the drive
attached to a Windows computer via a USB
adapter, and share the log - ValiDrive is like a
mini-SpinRite Level 5 across 576 regions of a
USB-attached drive.
Seeing both SpinRite and ValiDrive logs will let
us look over your shoulder and see what you
see, and more.
Thanks.
