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Forum Discussion
Reallocated sectors = data loss?
Ultra 6, 3x 2TB X-RAID2 62% full I have a failing disk, unfortunately due to a mistake by me I wasn't noticing the warning emails and it looks like its been throwing a steady stream of SMART erro...
If the reallocated sector count is lower than the number of sectors reserved for that purpose you won't have serious problems.
If the number of reallocated sectors is bigger than that, but there's enough free space available, than you most likely don't have serious problems regarding immediate availability of data on that hard disk.
Reallocating damaged sectors is a failsafe measure and while it definitely is signalling a serious problem with the disk, in most cases there is no data loss at all. It might be that a damaged sector was still readable but no longer writeable or if the sector was really no longer readable there's a good chance this can be handled on application level (i.e. a word document could be repaired or missing information could be guessed by the word application when opening it)
The data from a defunct sector is still preserved by copying it to a spare sector reserved for such purposes, thus "reallocated sector", and in most cases the sector is not completely faulty but maybe one bit flipped, which is usually easy to detect by the application and is then fixed.
The hard disk is broken, needs to be replaced ASAP and will definitely cause problems at some point, but it's very likely that such problems don't yield catastrophic data loss if detected early enough.
If the number of reallocated sectors is bigger than that, but there's enough free space available, than you most likely don't have serious problems regarding immediate availability of data on that hard disk.
Reallocating damaged sectors is a failsafe measure and while it definitely is signalling a serious problem with the disk, in most cases there is no data loss at all. It might be that a damaged sector was still readable but no longer writeable or if the sector was really no longer readable there's a good chance this can be handled on application level (i.e. a word document could be repaired or missing information could be guessed by the word application when opening it)
The data from a defunct sector is still preserved by copying it to a spare sector reserved for such purposes, thus "reallocated sector", and in most cases the sector is not completely faulty but maybe one bit flipped, which is usually easy to detect by the application and is then fixed.
The hard disk is broken, needs to be replaced ASAP and will definitely cause problems at some point, but it's very likely that such problems don't yield catastrophic data loss if detected early enough.
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