How many bad blocks can I live with on external?

[Dale Cooper]

Hi,
after noticing a that time machine has been really slow to back up lately (before 10.5.6 by the way), I started DiskWarrior and took a Disk Integrity check. After 15+ hours its not even halfway through on a 500gb disk, but its so far found 223 000 bad blocks (out of 282 000 000).
How BAD is this - should I stop trusting it for backing up important stuff (I have the most important stuff on two externals allready)? Is there anything that can be done with bad blocks? Thanks!

 

[garybUK]

Hi,
after noticing a that time machine has been really slow to back up lately (before 10.5.6 by the way), I started DiskWarrior and took a Disk Integrity check. After 15+ hours its not even halfway through on a 500gb disk, but its so far found 223 000 bad blocks (out of 282 000 000).
How BAD is this - should I stop trusting it for backing up important stuff (I have the most important stuff on two externals allready)? Is there anything that can be done with bad blocks? Thanks!

In my experience bad blocks are systematic of either a board failure on the drive or something wrong with the disks themselves. I wouldn't trust it for anything, infact i'd recover your data from it asap and replace the disk. I had a friends laptop drive do this and took me hours to recover the data onto a new disk for him.

 

[Dale Cooper]

Ok, thanks for quick reply! Was afraid I had to replace it - guess I have a new item on my wish list