How many bad sectors is still okay for a hard disk ??

[Souranil21 chakraborty]

so this 8 year old hard disk holding over 480gb of data mostly mutimedia and some important documents and projects that i have made (although most important stuff is backed up). It reported a drive failure during the initial startup after the post and when i checked the gnome disk utility it reported that the bad sectors on the drive has gone up from 52 to 136(it reported these 52 bad sectors back a year ago it had stayed the same and now it seems to have increased a bit). Now as my os is on the 256 ssd i am not concerned about that but should i be worried about potential data loss or is it okay if i replace the drive a bit later?? also upto how many bad sectors are acceptable for this type of mechanical drive.

[Tan3l6]

3 minutes ago, Souranil21 chakraborty said:

also upto how many bad sectors are acceptable for this type of mechanical drive.

0

 

I'd start backing up important data as fast as possible.

[Kilrah]

I'll add that you should always have backups of anything important before there are even any signs of potential incoming failure, things can die without warning at any time.

 

 

[Needfuldoer]

Back up everything you care about ASAP.

 

Keep an eye on the drive's SMART attributes. As long as the pending and reallocated sector counts aren't actively going up, you can use the drive for 'disposable' data you don't care about (as a scratch drive or in a portable enclosure, for example).

[DigitalGoat]

1 hour ago, Needfuldoer said:

Back up everything you care about ASAP.

 

Keep an eye on the drive's SMART attributes. As long as the pending and reallocated sector counts aren't actively going up, you can use the drive for 'disposable' data you don't care about (as a scratch drive or in a portable enclosure, for example).

As this poster states, keep an eye on how quickly the value increases.

All HDDs are made with a certain amount of spare space the drive can use to swap out failed sectors, this spare space is hidden from the consumer. If you knew the amount you could probably predict how much life the drive has left concerning re allocating sectors, but this information is not readily available.

[TomChaai]

If data is important, 1 is too many.

Migrate immediately and trash the drive.