Need a utility to mark the bad sectors of a drive so windows wont use them

[shortylickens]

http://www.hdtune.com/faq_1.html#health

Cuz apparently HD Tune cant do that and I'm not throwing out an expensive SSD just cuz of a few bad spots.

I seem to recall Norton could do that but I havent used Norton in MANY years.

 

[SlickR12345]

SSD's can't have bad sectors. It doesn't work the same way that HDD drives work with their magnetic plates and layers.

 

[shortylickens]

Umm, as a student of electronics and technician at Hynix semiconductor I know darn well transistors can burn out quite easily, and thats what Solid State Drives are made of.

Something is very freakin wrong with my drive I guess.

 

[lxskllr]

I think that's the job of the ssd firmware. If that weren't the case, you couldn't count on anything being on the drive when you tried to access it.

 

[mikeymikec]

Need a utility to mark the bad sectors of a drive so windows wont use them

chkdsk driveletter: /f /v /r

Furthermore, if I suspected an SSD was in bad shape, apart from doing a backup I would want to download whatever utilities the manufacturer has made for the drive in the hope of finding out more information about the problem and/or a solution from the manufacturer's software.

 

[schmuckley]

RMA or get another drive.
Maybe try a secure-erase/firmware update.

 

[Cerb]

Umm, as a student of electronics and technician at Hynix semiconductor I know darn well transistors can burn out quite easily, and thats what Solid State Drives are made of.

Something is very freakin wrong with my drive I guess.

Yup. It's not that they can't, but that the controller/firmware is designed to, as sectors start to go, to remap them, so you never see a bad block. For example, TR's endurance test w/ the 840 Evo got insane amounts of reallocated sectors towards the end, but did not lose a single byte of data.

Depending on SSD, a secure erase might do well enough, to keep using it.

 

[shortylickens]

OK, HD Tune did not find anything bad after two thorough passes.

Windows 7 did, surprisingly. And fixed it. Which is weird. I'm not used to that.

So drive is back in my game system, and works fine.

 

[mikeymikec]

What were the results of the disk check?

Run eventvwr

Windows Logs > Application Log
look for an entry with a time corresponding to when the check completed, with the source 'wininit'.

 

[xgsound]

I'm new to SSDs. Here is the important things I found out.

SSDs and spindle disks have uniquely different utilities to accomplish the same tasks due to their limitations.

An SSD should never be defragged or repeatedly tested (including benchmarks) because each bit has a finite times it can be written to. Firmware replaces bad "blocks" on the fly. Trim and garbage collection handles the rest. Windows 7 and above are supposed to do this on their own. An SSD toolbox by the manufacturer can determine SSD disk health and should handle maintenance duties on older OSs.

The procedures that were prudent on spindle disks such as surface checks and defragging are counter productive on an SSD.

Jim

 

[PliotronX]

chkdsk driveletter: /f /v /r

Furthermore, if I suspected an SSD was in bad shape, apart from doing a backup I would want to download whatever utilities the manufacturer has made for the drive in the hope of finding out more information about the problem and/or a solution from the manufacturer's software.

Chkdsk /r is the only way to do it for Windows. It will mark bad sectors in the logical structure but if the SMART status shows reallocated sectors I would look into R MA or perhaps over provisioning may help.

 

[fandroid]

RepartitionBadDrive is a tool which can create separate partitions of bad sectors . There aren't hidden but you can delete the drive letters from windows disk management so the partitions will disappear from your computer.