Originally Posted by
Scrappah
( Thread drift warning.)
It's a little off topic but i was reading the other day that a few bad sectors on a mechanical drive are normal. A brand new platter surface is quite good but it's not perfect. Apparently there are "spare sectors" built in and as the computer encounters a bad sector it pulls it out of service and transfers the data to one of the spares.
An aging drive might have used up all of it's spares so that would be a problem.
By that reasoning, the S.M.A.R.T. looks like it would be the best indicator of the condition of the drive be it either mechanical -or- SSD ?
Yes you are correct...all drive have some extra sectors it remaps the data form bad sectors to. Mechanical drive slow down because the drive head has to find a different track for the moved data while SSD doesn't work that way hence no speed degradation.
Both SSD and Mechanical drives utilize S.M.A.R.T. you can download any number of free and professional programs to run S.M.A.R.T. testing to help indicate the health of a drive.
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