Is a hard drive with bad sectors useable

[Faisal A]

I can get a 2tb hdd with 3 bad sectors for cheap. Is it still useable

[mariushm]

I wouldn't buy one but I would use one.

It depends on the drive's history and where the bad sectors are. I've had one drive that developed a few bad sectors in an area, so I've resized the partition so that those bad sectors were in a 1-2 GB space outside any partition, and kept using it for less important things (games, movies) knowing if it craps out, I won't mind it.

[Kilrah]

Usually once there starts being some more will come very soon.

 

Recently had a drive that hung on an operation, resulting in one bad sector being displayed. I didn't care about the drive becasue it was just Steam games on it and I had others I could swap, but for funsies I went to read it all with ddrescue to see how much "unknown" there would be - once the whole drive was browsed there were actually thousands of bad sectors.