Do you retire your spinners when health drops below 100%?

[Fritz]

I've got a collection of drives with bad sectors. Health (as measured by HD Sentinel) is between 70% and 99%. Besides as a scratch disk can these be used for anything useful?

 

[Wasmachineman_NL]

Bad sectors = waste metal bin is my policy.

 

[Glock24]

I've never seen HDD health reported as a percentage, they are either good or bad. If bad sectors pop up I discard them.

 

[edge]

Spinners? I don't have any. Went the way of the dodo about 4 years ago for me.

 

[BackupProphet]

I use them until they start causing problems, a few hundred bad sectors doesn't matter. ZFS takes care of that.

 

[Fritz]

I use them until they start causing problems, a few hundred bad sectors doesn't matter. ZFS takes care of that.

Thanks. Finally got a response that answers my question.

 

[Glock24]

I use them until they start causing problems, a few hundred bad sectors doesn't matter. ZFS takes care of that.

You may not have data corruption but sure you'll have degraded performance.

 

[BackupProphet]

No, hard drives have reserved space for a few thousand remaps of bad sectors, you can see the how close you are to a threshold with smartctl.

If you get close to that treshold, I would consider replacing the hard drive because then you will risk degraded performance/behavior .