2

While running Spinrite (from GRC.com), one of the screens shows a "Raw Data Snapshot". This usually shows data from hard drive sectors flash past as they are read or written.

On one drive in an HP laptop, a lot of times during the scan, the "Raw Data Snapshot" instead says "Empty Sector", nicely centered in the window.

Is this a message from Spinrite? Is it actual data left over from the manufacturing process? If it's a message from Spinrite, how does it know? What's the difference between an "Empty Sector" and a sector full of zeroes, or full of some other random data?

Jamie Cox
  • 679

1 Answers1

1

What is an "Empty Sector"?

Modern disks have a pool of spare sectors that can be swapped with damaged sectors.

This is called the Empty or Spare Sector Pool.

Spare sector pools

All modern hard disk drives have a spare sector pool. This is used when bad sectors develop during the normal life of the hard disk and any new bad sectors are 'replaced' with good ones from the spare sector pool. This process is invisible to the user and will probably never know that anything has changed.

Source Bad sector remapping

Community
  • 1
DavidPostill
  • 162,382