IIRC, HDDs have some reserved sectors in case some go bad. But in practice, once you start having faulty sectors it’s usually a sign that the drive is dying and you should replace it ASAP.
I think if you know drive topology you can technically create partitions on platter level, but I don’t really see a reason why you’d do it. If the drive is dying you need to resilver the entire drive’s content to a new disk anyway.
Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 2 weeks ago
@Fmstrat @veeesix Since there's two very diffrent questions there.. The first, "where do the failures happen?": anywhere. It could be the controller dying (in which case the platters themselves are fine if you replace the board, but otherwise the whole thing is toast). It could be the head breaking. It could be issues with a specific platter. It could be something that affects _all_ the platters (like dust getting inside the sealed area). So basically, it very much depends.
Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 2 weeks ago
@Fmstrat @veeesix The second, could you do raid across specific platters - yes and know. The drive firmware specifically hides the details of the underlying platter layout. But if you targeted a specific model, you could probably hack something together that would do raid across the platters. But given the answer to the first question, why would you?
Fmstrat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Great answers, thank you.