Using a HDD with bad sectors for low (no) risk purposes

[nemesis1782]

Hi Guys,

here I am again with another question that'll instantly make some explode into...

Anyway, I have a Synology NAS and setting up a TrueNAS as well. On at least one of these systems I'll have a location which will receive downloaded data, do some parity, unpack and then move. SO NO OTHER RISK OF MAYBE GETTING A MESSAGE THAT A DOWNLOAD FAILED!

Yesterday I replaced a old 4years 6TB WD Red with a new WD Gold. A pricey investment but well worth the security of my data.

I now have a 4 year old 6TB disk lying here with 144 bad sectors. Out of the well, many! I hate the way our sociaty has become. Throwing anything away without even a thought of can we still use it for something and reduce waste maybe?

Now in my opinion the disk I have is usable for the task I've selected for it. Can TrueNAS mark and block the bad secotrs for me and make the disk usable? Worst case it'll live another few days and save another disk some read/write operations.

So:
- can I use this disk in TrueNAS?
- can I configure TrueNAS to detect the bad sectors and mark the automatically blocking them form use?
- can I configure TrueNAS to write the data to another sector if writing the data to the original sector failed?

 

[SweetAndLow]

It will probably fail within a couple days. Truenas doesn't write to sectors that's handled by the hdd so you can just ignore that. Worth a try if you want but set your expectations low. Does it fail smart tests? If it falls I would throw it in the trash.

 

[nemesis1782]

It will probably fail within a couple days. Truenas doesn't write to sectors that's handled by the hdd so you can just ignore that. Worth a try if you want but set your expectations low.

Hi Thnx for the reply,

Yeah people always say that. But I have a old 500GB drive in my Desktop I use for my download location, it's all the partition does. I've been using it for this purpose for years in multiple systems as such. My Windows download folder is mapped to it. (I used a tool to format the the disk and create partitions which I then merge around the bad sectors, easy as pie, the resulting partition is 100GB, when I run into issues I move one of the partitions)
This disk started showing bad sectors more the 10 years ago, so if we take the life of this 6TB disk of 4 years. The means about 3 disks weren't wasted!

As for the disk handling sectors or blocks that is incorrect. It does handle bad sector remaps though. It's regretable that I'm unable to tell the disk to be 3TB and remap using the 3TB which could in theory increase it's lifetime significantly! With the desity of disks now a days bad sectors are inevitable, so why not give the user the choice to set a larger remap.

Does it fail smart tests? If it falls I would throw it in the trash.

Please do not advice people to put stuff in the trash. At least motivate them to bring it somewhere it might actually get recycled.