smartd is warning that my ATA disk has unreadable or uncorrectable or pending sectors. Whats going on?
Disk drives store data in blocks (sectors) of 512 bytes. Each 512 bytes has additional bytes appended to it (usually 40 to 60) which are used internally by the disk firmware for error checking/detection and correction. These are called ECC bytes. Sometimes the data in a sector gets corrupted. This can happen because a speck of dust scratched the disk, or because the disk was powered down while writing data to that sector, or for other reasons. Usually the ECC bytes can be used to correct the corrupted data. However if the ECC bytes are inconsistent or can’t be used to correct the bad data, then the 512 bytes of data are lost. Such a sector is called unreadable or uncorrectable. If your disk has an unreadable sector, this means that some of your data can’t be retrieved. You can force the disk to replace the unreadable sector with a spare good sector, but only at the price of losing the 512 bytes of data forever. Disks with uncorrectable sectors can often be repaired by using the disk ma
