When the solid-state drive’s extra memory runs out, the drive’s capacity will start to drop as sectors become unreadable. On a solid-state drive, natural wear will eventually result in sectors becoming bad as they’re written to many times, and they’ll be remapped to the solid-state drive’s extra - or “overprovisioned” - memory. These are marked as defective and are remapped to some of the solid-state drive’s extra memory cells. That’s why solid-state drives often ship with some defective blocks. Modern manufacturing techniques aren’t perfect, and there’s a margin or error in everything. Your hard drive may have shipped from the factory with bad sectors. Windows’ Disk Check tool can also repair such bad sectors. These may be marked as bad sectors, but can be repaired by overwriting the drive with zeros - or, in the old days, performing a low-level format.
#WHAT IS A DIRTY DRIVE OS X DISK REPAIR CODE#
The operating system may have tried to read data on the hard drive from this sector and found that the error-correcting code (ECC) didn’t match the contents of the sector, which suggests that something is wrong.
This type of sector cannot be repaired.Ī logical - or soft - bad sector is a cluster of storage on the hard drive that appears to not be working properly. The hard drive’s head may have touched that part of the hard drive and damaged it, some dust may have settled on that sector and ruined it, a solid-state drive’s flash memory cell may have worn out, or the hard drive may have had other defects or wear issues that caused the sector to become physically damaged.
There are two types of bad sectors - often divided into “physical” and “logical” bad sectors or “hard” and “soft” bad sectors.Ī physical - or hard - bad sector is a cluster of storage on the hard drive that’s physically damaged.