Give your HDD one last job with "Removed Bad Sector Degredation Areas" via Marked Unusable Partitioning Scheme.
As hard Drives get used their "reallocatable sectors" become used up, therefore the disk "wears out". The idea behind this application, is to find these "wear spots" and remove them from useable space via the use of partitions at a high level.
This is just to allow data that does not change often to be stored on a hard drive, for backup purposes. Do not assume that the drive will remain "happy" during further R/W cycles, just that it can be used as a snapshot for Software raid, or even just as a removeable copy disk.
Yes, and No. If you have invested money in a large disk, and you just want to throw it away, then fine (Recycle it!). This application, just allows you to get more "Return On Your Invest", before the physical recycle process is needed.
Yes they can be, and as such they can be recovered by performing a write over, but if the "SMART" data flags of the hard drive are signalling any "Uncorrectable Sector Counts" or high "Reallocated Sector Counts", then this is an indication of the disk wearing out at those locations. There are two types of bad sectors often divided into physical and logical bad sectors or hard and soft bad sectors.
Yes it will be !
I used to use that other tool, but when the HDD's got above 1TB, then the calculations for progress and completion becoma nonsense (i.e. -1000998765% to complete). It also did not have a very interactive display, which did not show the areas that would be excluded, when entering partition scheme values (they had to be entered before starting).
I've heard that as well, and I have tried it on drives that start to report SMART count errors, But it always seems that the warnings go away, and then the drive fails anyway, just when you don't want it to, which means that your data has been in jepordy twice (1st time to identify that a LLFormat is required, then again with the sudden failure!)
smartmon tools
do not work with them, but the older version does!)Crystal Disk Info
does a really good job !