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Topic starter
Hi, in softraid I received a warning about one of my disks about having 8 unreliable sectors. There aren’t any reallocated sectors though.
The disk details show:
reallocated sectors: 0
unreliable sectors: 8
i/o requests: 44,726,285
i/o errors: 0
Just wondering, if I use Softraid to validate the disk, would it reduce the unreliable sector count if the data can now be successfully read, and reallocate the sectors that need reallocation? I wasn’t sure if validation would address the issue, or if I need to move the data off the disk and certify the disk?
Thanks
Posted : 18/03/2026 4:44 pm
Validate will not do anything useful in this scenario, neither will "verify disk".
Unreliable sectors can be caused by more than one event, it could be transient, power related, or a failing sector. It means a sector had to be retried to read.
What you need to do is backup. You are going to have to "certify" the disk. I would do all the drives while I was at it, it takes about a day per 2TB. But you can do just the one disk, if you cannot afford to be without your volume for that time. Assuming you are backed up and this is a RAID 5 volume, you can certify the one disk. it will either fix the problem, or reallocate sectors, which is an indicator you should replace the drives.
But the certify should clear the unreliable flag. (or change the state to reallocated)
Posted : 20/03/2026 12:58 am
Topic starter
Thanks for the information. The drive is part of mirrored volume.
Just wanted to make sure I understand the steps to certify:
1. Backup data from the volume
2. Right click on the mirrored volume and select "split mirror", select the disk with unreliable sectors, and select volume type as "non-Raid"
3. Right click on the disk, select certify.
4. After certification, add the disk back to the mirrored volume.
Thanks!
Posted : 21/03/2026 5:15 am
