Pending Sectors
A few nights ago I had the top of my server off and using an electric blower to clear out dust while the server was on and building hashes for the File Integrity plugin. While doing this I get a notification of 8 pending sectors on 2 separate 8TB shucked reds, disk 1 and 2, in the physical 3 and 4 spots on my supermicro case. I immediately go to the webui and run a quick smart test on both, both pass. I then run an extended smart test on both and they both pass. After that, a non correcting parity sync just finished with zero errors, however both drives still have 8 pending sectors.
Shouldn't the parity sync have either had errors when it got to the pending sectors, or if no errors and been able to read them cleared the pending sectors? What logs would anyone need to take a look at this and let me know if they can tell what happened? Other than the pending sectors everything else with the drives is working great.
Thanks!
Posted May 23, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC
Pending Sectors are on the verge of "good sectors" and "Reallocated sectors"
If the Sectors are later read successfully, the number should go down and you shouldn't see a warning again.
If the Sectors are later read and return bad data (read unsuccessfully), they'll be re-allocated and you'll get a reallocated sector warning.
The majority i've seen on this sub will tell you to immediately swap the drive out if it has a bad sector.
personally, I advice to be prepared, just because a few sectors go bad, doesn't mean your drive dies within a day or two, assess the risk first before taking drastic measures.
A Seagate drive of mine currently has 8 sectors reallocated, but since it's just a long-term seeding drive for torrents, I don't worry too much about it, only if the reallocated sector count would drastically increase over night, then i'd probably get a new drive.
But then again, you might have more important data on it than I have.