Reallocated sector count continues to climb

I had a drive that eventually failed due to reallocated sector count. It was a Seagate drive, so I e-mailed Seagate my questions; here is a paraphrase of what they had to say:

• The drive has extra space to deal with bad sectors being found


• Each time a sector is marked bad you lose all data that was held in that sector


• There is a SMART threshold defined to let you know when this extra space has been used up (for me it seemed to be over 1000 sectors)


• Once the drive hits this SMART threshold SeaTools will return an error code and SeaGate will authorize an RMA (if the drive is in warranty)


• It is not uncommon for a drive to run into a few bad sectors


• These reallocated sectors can impact drive performance

This drive did not come with a ReadyNAS device though, so I would imagine your RMA situation is different.

The ReadyNAS device informed me once the SMART threshold had been triggered. It did bug me that I was potentially losing data each time a sector was reallocated, but that they did not consider it a problem until I had lost hundreds of sectors. I have since had another drive show reallocated sectors, but it stabilized at 37 and has not had another increase in the last six months.