How to eliminate bad sector on my 128 GB SSD?
A user from tomshardware asked this question
Well, we can’t eliminate the physical bad sectors (we say ‘sectors’ instead of ‘sector’ is because bad-sector always show in group), but we can isolate them?
Scan Bad Sectors in Disk Scanner
To isolate them, we need to find them first, there’re two programs for us to locate bad sectors on SSD: Partition Expert and Disk Scanner
Disk Scanner is a tool especially designed for scanning disk physical bad sectors, it’s also a portable program, so we can directly run it from the downloaded portable package, here’s the interface
From the screenshot we can tell that there’re many bad sectors (red dots) on the middle of the section, there maybe some other down below, which you can’t see because Scanner haven’t finished scanning yet (but there’s no, we had run a thorough test on this disk).
Scan Bad Sectors in Partition Expert
Or you can just run Partition Expert (still portable program), and click Surface Test on the target SSD, you’ll see the interface is just like Scanner’s, click Scan Now and the same result, take a look at the software
Isolate Bad Sectors
We’ll already know where bad sectors are allocated on the SSD now, it’s time to isolate them and we need to Partition Expert only, Disk Scanner just can’t help on partition operations, we can roughly isolate bad sectors areas, or just check the scan_log and do a accurate isolation (which is really not necessary if the bad sectors are so concentrated)
So here’s the theory of isolating, we’ve found them now, it’s on the top about on the one third part of the SSD, if there’s a partition on that area, C Drive, for example, it’s at the end of the drive, takes about one eighth space of the C Drive, so here’s the step,
1. Click on the partition that contains bad sector (if you partitioned this disk to 3 equal-sized partition, click on the first partition) and click Resize/Move Volume
2. In the resize window, hold and drag the right side handle to the left about one eighth to shrink this volume and separate bad sectors
3. Click OK and Commit
Don’t worry if you haven’t partition the disk to same-sized partition, if that area is at the head of another partition, you can do the same to isolate them. If you still not sure bad sectors are completely isolated, you can enlarge the area when you have enough free space on the disk.
In this example, you can shrink the end of C Drive and the head of D Drive a bit to ensure all the bad sectors are isolated.
Let all the bad sectors go into unallocated space, is the spirit of isolating.
Sure enough, it’s better to replace the bad-sectored SSD with a new one if the situation is too bad, but 20G bad sector in 128G, why not to isolate them and reuse the rest of good sectors.