Hi, I would need some suggestions over an issue.
I have 2 external drives which have some bad sectors, model Samsung G2 portable of 640 GB. Both are no longer under warranty as they are more than 3 years old.
Naturally, I moved all my important data on another drives. But, since the number of bad sectors is (or, more exactly, was) not very high, several hundreds at most, I intended to keep using them (for "junk" data, which I would not care about if it is suddenly lost) until they would simply fall apart.
I had once a hard drive (internal) which showed bad sectors and I was able to use it intensively for more than 18 months after the first bad sectors appeared.
But here is a little problem: I reformatted both drive in order to have the bad sectors marked as "bad" and re-allocated. But, while the bad sectors dissappeared after the reformat, the reformatting resulted in several sections of the drives (tipically of 5-10 GB in size) becoming extremely slow.
One of the drives showed bad sectors almost 2 years ago. Reformatting removed them and no new ones appeared, but there are small parts of the drive where the writing speed slaws to a crawl (up to 1-2 MB/s). The reading speed is fine over the entire drives.
The second drive (which went bad just a week ago) again had no bad sectors after reformat anymore and its health status is labeled as ok by HDTune Pro (the tool I use for drive diagnostic), but there is at least one part of the drive where the reading speed, this rime, becomes very slow. The part is at the position 48-54 GB on HDTune's drive map and the reading speed slows down there to 4-5 MB/s. The writing speed is fine over the entire drive.
Is there any way to fix this? Not to repair the damaged sector (that is pretty much impossible most of the time), but at least to mark the slower sections so that Windows won't try to write there.
The drives are still usable; the first which went bad had been stable for more than a year with constant usage, but this speed problem can become irritating when you hit the faulty sections.
Any ideas?
PS: Do NOT, under any circumstances, suggest buying replacement drives. Seriously, to buy some new ones it's something anyone can think of and does not need to ask expert advice for this - yet it seems to have become a common trope for some people, whenever they see the words "damaged drive", to reflexively suggest "buy a new one", regardless of the actual inquiry.
I also happen to have replacements and I'm not going to keep any important data on the faulty drives anymore. Everything which will go on them from now on will be expendable. It is just that I'm reluctant to completely let go of two drives which could still be used for a long time.
The first time I experienced bad sectors on a drive (a 3'5 drive in an external enclosure), the respective drive was still used intensively for more than 20 months, while the number of bad sectors remained stable. And, in the end, I gave up on it not because it failed, but because I shifted to smaller 2'5 drives.
Similarily, one of the current two Samsung G2s with bad sectors is still in use after more than 18 months and no new bad sectors appeared.
It's just I would like to know whether this speed problem in certain small sectors can be worked around somehow.