While primarily used as a metric of the life expectancy of the drive, this number also affects performance. As the count of reallocated sectors increases, the read/write speed tends to become worse because the drive head is forced to seek to the reserved area whenever a remap is accessed. If sequential access speed is critical, the remapped sectors can be manually marked as bad blocks in the file system in order to prevent their use.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.
You could run a full format instead of a quick format. It should either attempt to recover the bad sector or mark it as bad and unusable. I've done it in the past to get rid of the reallocated sectors count and prevent data writing on the bad sector which causes the HDD to stall.
If there are enough relocated sectors to effect performance I'd say its time to replace the HDD. A few sectors are not going to cause any significant speed difference. (we're talking 512 or 4096 bytes here)
I'm not sure what would be used to do that, but I'm also not sure it's a good idea and seems mostly pointless, especially these days.
The point of doing it, as stated above, is to avoid losing *some* performance under sequential read/write scenarios. If a few percentage points loss in sequential scenarios is that big of a deal, then it's time to upgrade to an SSD for vastly higher performance, not mark reserved space as bad on an HDD.
But, as I've said, not sure what to use to accomplish it.
I don't see much performance improvement can be made when there is a USB 2.0 bottleneck, assumption based on that its an old external HDD.
The disk responds really slow under certain tasks, like for example during decompressing large RAR files. I thought to give Wikipedia's suggestion a try and see if it would improve its performance.
No. 15888 (and climbing, no doubt)? It's TRASHED. Pull the life support and move on. You may very well already have corrupted data on the drive. 10-15 over the life of the drive is high. 100x that is insane.There are 15888 reallocated sectors, but I don't store important files to this disk (it's an external Toshiba portable drive) so I wish to keep it until it stops working. The number of the reallocated sectors increases slowly by the way so maybe it could still work for some time...
Regardless the danger of keeping this drive does anyone know how the thing that Wikipedia describes can be done?
It was almost certainly trying to re-read/write weak sectors, and/or was re-allocating them during that process.Well after the number of reallocated sectors increased the performance during certain tasks (as decompressing large RAR files as I have already mentioned) decreased noticeably. I don't thing that this drop of performance has anything to do with USB 2.0 bottleneck!
There are 15888 reallocated sectors, but I don't store important files to this disk (it's an external Toshiba portable drive) so I wish to keep it until it stops working. The number of the reallocated sectors increases slowly by the way so maybe it could still work for some time...
Regardless the danger of keeping this drive does anyone know how the thing that Wikipedia describes can be done?
No. 15888 (and climbing, no doubt)? It's TRASHED. Pull the life support and move on. You may very well already have corrupted data on the drive. 10-15 over the life of the drive is high. 100x that is insane.
It was almost certainly trying to re-read/write weak sectors, and/or was re-allocating them during that process.
In its current state, it's pretty much gone. The only thing you can do is replace it. All that will happen if you keep using it is corruption.
Its increasing because its semi trashed already and the speed will always be slow because new bad sectors are popping up which the drive is trying to reread over and over again.
I don't know if theres a utility apart from vendor supplied tools which can do it because manufacturers don't allow low level access like the old days to write to sectors/tracks anymore.
Wikipedia states for HDD reallocated sectors:
Is there a specific program that does this job (marks the reallocated sectors of the reserved area as bad)?