I’m running Alsoft’s DiskWarrior on a customer’s machine (not booting, locks up when loading the OS) and as of this exact moment…
9/24/08 6:32 PM
the Bad Block count is up to a whopping 730 bad blocks[/
It’s now generating a new directory structure, but there’s not much we can d for this drive, short of replacing it…
See why you shouldn’t trust hard drives, and why regular backups are important?
Can’t trust formatting either. 
[Keanu]Whoa…[/Keanu]
730 bad blocks - did they toss the poor Mac down a flight of stairs?
I’ve had worse.
And it was my backup drive.
Was.
the OP was a quick post as I headed out the door, so I did Belgium up the formatting a tad
I’d say this 730 bad block drive is on the short list of “Most bad blocks I’ve seen” list, easily in the top 5
The machine itself does not appear to be abused in any way, no dents, or physical damage, and it’s one of the models with the Sudden Motion Sensor g-force sensor, if this machine was dropped, the hard drive would have spun itself down and parked the heads to save the platters
Western Digital drive, by any chance? All the top bad-blockers I’ve seen have been WD.
I’m not going to comment on their quality. However, could your observation be based on the fact that they make a large percentage of all hard drives?
That said, I prefer Seagate simply because their warranty is longer.
LaCie, actually. 500 GB “Big Disk Extreme”.
OP’s already come back to clarify his/her customer’s drive type, but my external WD has treated me right so far.
Maxtors, on the other hand, are total data loss waiting to happen.
(Edit: better wording)
It’s a Fujitsu drive in this machine
Customer’s looking at 100% data loss 
came in this morning, it was hung at the building report stage, the drive’s hosed
when DiskWarrior was counting up the bad blocks, it would count up rapidly, often in groups of 3-9, and it only took about an hour to reach 730 bad blocks, normally, drives with large numbers of bad blocks take a few hours to reach that count, I’m thinking this was a head-crash or something…
My fellow Dopers, PLEASE perform regular backups, this could happen to anyone
My personal record was a Maxtor that got ramped up to an internal temp of 145 degrees during a cooling system failure in a RAID server.
500GB, 1874 bad blocks according to SMART. And yet, it remapped and rejoined the RAID array.
Tough drive.
No, first-hand experience; although admittedly this was several years ago. My current drive is a Maxtor with which I’ve had zero issues. Prior to that, it was a Fujitsu which lasted at least 5 or 6 years as my primary drive–probably could have gone longer but I replaced it due to capacity limitations.
Did you try Data Rescue X?
