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I picked up a VERY inexpensive seagate 500gb sata drive - refurbished, but refuse to use the thing until it's passes a surface scan.
After about 40min, it's checked about 25mil of the .97 BILLION blocks.
I have this running on a 733mhz G4. Looks like it'll take days, not hours. It's ok, I'm patient...
yes... I KNOW some of you would never touch a refurb drive (and yet have no problem with refurb computers - that may have refurb drives in them...)
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A very long time...many hours. Just let it run.
Likely, the drive is fine. Most refurbs don't have as much use...not even close...as the 'normal' drives you use everyday.
Every new drive in a refurb after 1 second of use. lol
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[quote onthedownlow]Every new drive in a refurb after 1 second of use. lol
of course... never thought of it that way. You might even say that every new drive becomes an UNTESTED refurb after one second of use. Therefor, refurbs SHOULD be preferred...
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how do you do a surface scan in OS X? Does Disk Utility do surface scans?
Anyway, you have scanned 25 mil (25 millions I assume) out of 970 millions. You need to do this about 39 times, x 40 minutes comes out to almost 1550 minutes, which is almost 26 hours.
What I do when I get a new drive, I erase it and write "zeros" on it. Is that the same thing as a surface scan?
Good luck!
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Thanks for doing the math - I'm too lazy.
I'm using drive genius 1.5 - I think writing zeros might do the same, but it won't report found bad sectors. If the thing is loaded with bad sectors, I'll return it.
I just wanna make sure the drive is sound before I start loading stuff on it...
it just passed 100mil - no bad blocks so far...
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Then there is the big question: how many bad blocks are acceptable? 100, 200, 300, more? I suppose the most important question is not the absolute number but whether, and how fast, the number changes over time. I am not sure what you could use to monitor this.
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Finished before I woke up.
ZERO bad blocks found - out of 976,000,000, that aint bad...
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I don't know that there's an answer to how many bad blocks are acceptable.
For one thing, it would depend on how many are in reserve. When possible a good block is mapped in when a bad one is mapped out.
That can only go on for so long.
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F O R E V E R.
or maybe just under 24 hours
