Comment 175 for bug 438136

Just want to reiterate what a bad idea it is to:

a) make your own seat of the pants algorithm to determine how many bad sectors is "too many" based on no significant data.

b) do so when you can't even read the raw number correctly (due to varying format of raw values).

My wife's 120G laptop drive has 10 bad sectors, but palimpsest still reads this as 655424. (The 0x0a is the low order byte in intel byte order see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498115#c61 for details, still fails in Fedora 16, gnome-disk-utility-3.0.2.) The 1024 factor *still* sees the disk as failing - it does not address the underlying problem of not having a reliable raw value, and not knowing the design parameters or even the type of technology.

Please, please, just use the vendor numbers. The only thing you could add would be to keep a history, and warn of *changes* in the value (but don't say "OH MY GOD YOUR DISK IS ABOUT TO DIE!" unless the scaled value passes the vendor threshold).