How many bad sectors is real bad? HDD talk

[Anapan]

@Xeogred
That drive error readout sounds just fine. That's actually more healthy than most of my drives.

I may have been a little harsh on Seagates, I've had many external drives fail - I travelled with them. I wasn't lying when I said that all my external 2TB Seagates failed, tho there were a few Western Digital that failed as well.
Still, on average I get more Seagate failures that need recovery than any other brand.
I've still got small capacity Maxtor and Quantum Fireball drives from the early 90's that have been running nearly-constantly and never died. Those things are impressive - always loud to read or write but never any errors when checked.

I see refurbished SSDs on Newegg for really cheap. Has anyone ever had a SSD fail? I mostly only run SSds for the system drives in all my PCs now. I read they can fail after years of use because of millions of writes, but why are there refurb drives available? Aren't they rock-solid and infallible? Were they just returns or did they fail?

[Exhuminator]

I like to read Backblaze's HDD reports:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-dri ... s-q3-2016/

Just putting that out there.

[isiolia]

I see refurbished SSDs on Newegg for really cheap. Has anyone ever had a SSD fail? I mostly only run SSds for the system drives in all my PCs now. I read they can fail after years of use because of millions of writes, but why are there refurb drives available? Aren't they rock-solid and infallible? Were they just returns or did they fail?

Not personally owned ones, but I've had a handful of them fail at work. I think only one of them was due to abnormal wear, which basically puts the drive at end-of-life for write cycles - if most are like that, then basically they go to read-only mode. 'course, the drive was in a normal-use laptop for less than a year, so it shouldn't have had that happen...but it's remotely possible that Spotify murdered it, or something similar.
Others have basically just up and died. One of them even got sent to a recovery service that, ultimately, was unable to do anything with it (I think the controller chip went, in that case). From what I've seen, SSDs do tend to be very reliable, and tend to actually last a lot longer than rated...but if they fail, they fail hard. HDDs can as well, but often have more of a grey area where you can actually recover something, and/or more of a decline instead of a sudden outright failure.

I suspect that refurbs are probably more open box type returns, but hard to say.

[Anapan]

Thanks for that, Isiolia. I suspected as much too.

[Xeogred]

So it was just like two weeks ago since I posted this and I'm glad I'm noting the numbers...

Today: Reallocated Sector Count: 3565

November 27th: 704

The drive seems to hang pretty badly when I try unzipping stuff there (I have a lot of music on it). Or also zipping. Otherwise seems normal, but that's something weird I've noticed lately, it's not handling archive files well for some reason. There was a big archive file I kept trying to unzip a few days ago and it just kept hanging, but when I moved it to another drive it unzipped fine.

Ran CrystalDiskInfo earlier today and it didn't even show the drive, but I quickly checked and could access it. Ran CrystalDiskInfo again and it was there. Still kind of spooky though?

Kind of funny how hard the physical case vibrates too, compared to my WD Elements external that feels like it's never even on.

[Xeogred]

Pretty sure this Seagate is about to nosedive.

Reallocated Sector Count: 3664
Current Pending Sector Count: 160
Uncorrectable Sector Count: 160

CrystalDiskInfo continues to not always pick it up.

Had some error this morning after moving some files, source disk couldn't be read I think. But everything I copied over made it.

Ran a quick Seatools test and it failed at 10% in.

Just about everything is copied over so it shouldn't be a problem, but I guess this is junk now.

EDIT: Moved everything over. Got several "source disk/file could not be read" so I lost some files (though just some anime I can download again). Ran the long test with Seatools and it failed that too. Checked to see if I have a warranty with it but it's out of warranty. Piece of junk now I guess.