


The sign is an indicator that the drive is no longer safe for data storage.Īnd if you continue to use the drive for data storage, the data may get corrupt and the drive may turn inaccessible or even fail, which can lead to permanent data loss. That’s the reason why you see a warning sign in the SMART disk information. The reserved area is set aside by the disk for normal operation of the drive and to prevent immediate data loss due to bad sectors.Īs the reallocation sector count increases, the ability of disk to remap or reallocate data from bad sectors decreases. When a system can’t read, write, or verify data stored at a particular sector, it marks the sector bad and reallocates or remaps the stored data to a reserved area (spare area) on the hard drive. A significant and consistent increase in the ‘ reallocated sector count’ attribute value is a clear sign of a dying hard drive, indicating imminent drive failure.Įssentially, the reallocated sector-also known as bad sector or bad block-is an area on the disk that is no longer safe to store data. Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting or SMART is a drive monitoring system embedded on hard drives, solid-state drives, and eMMC storage.
