Hard drive had reallocated sectors...but now it magically doesn't! Can I trust it?

Solution 1:

If it were me, I wouldn't trust it. It's already been marked as bad. Not as a warning, but as flat out "This sector is bad, no doubt about it."

By nature of SMART, it's programmed the way it is to find real problems vs. good drive (duh). If it says they were bad, I'd stick with that.

Ask yourself one question: Is it easier to replace a drive or the data?

Solution 2:

I contacted Seagate regarding the issue and they did not provide any further information, but they didn't have any problem honoring the warranty.

I just feel bad for the sucker who gets the drive that I sent in, if Seagate just ends up running SMART diagnostics, and resetting the SMART counters and boxing the drive back up when they fail to find any problems.

Solution 3:

I had the same problem some days ago with a drive with 100+ errored sectors. I used dd to check the surface... and magically the errored sectors where gone.

So I read Hitachi's documentations. One of them garanty their profesionnal drives don't do this (they use a special sentence for that, but I forgot which). Nothing about the consumer drives, so I guess they hide those sectors in certain circumstances.
I didn't read other companies datasheets in detail, but they probably do the same thing.

My personnel conclusion is : manufacturers no longer (if they already did) report correct error sector count on consumer grade drives. This is probably to let their drive appear better than in reallity.