Bad Sector
A Sector on the surface of the drive which is reported by the operating system as flawed.
New hard drives should not normally show any bad sectors because of the use of "Defect Management". Usually, defective sectors or tracks are retired and data are written in alternate locations.
This, however, should impose some performance pentalties on the drive. So, different drives of the same exactly model might exhibit somewhat different results under the same test conditions.
However, additional bad sectors should occur only infrequently if a drive is functioning properly. When someone formats a disk, the operating system identifies any bad sectors on the disk (I.e., non-recoverable by the defect management subsystem) and marks them so they will not be used. If a sector that already contains data becomes damaged, you will need special software to recover the data. Quite often reported bad sectors are not physically damaged, they can be revived by performing a Low Level Format on the hard drive. This will, however, erase all data. Some disk manufacturers provide free Low Level Format programs for this purpose. Others can be acquired from ISV's.
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