How common are Retired Sectors on a NEW drive?

SSD (Solid State Drives) All Other SanDisk SSD
1

I just got my drive at the end of November 2012 (Thanksgiving / Black Friday sale). SanDisk Extreme 240GB.

I brought it home, updated the firmware, and started using it with Windows.

After some time, I went and then booted into Linux - I got a SMART error that said the drive may be failing, as SMART had recorded Reallocated Sectors.

When I booted back to Windows, I loaded the SanDisk SSD Toolbox, and sure enough it said I had 1 Retired Block already.

It lists the threshold for retired blocks as 3, and I already have 1. I went back to the store, but it was already past the 30 day exchange window. They told me to contact SanDisk if I think there’s an issue with it.

So, is this a BAD sign? Does SanDisk do RMAs for drives like this?

I mean, it seems to work fine, but a 1/3rd of allowed retired blocks have failed already in the first month of use.

2

retired blocks are not all that common but they do occur. as long as you have not reached the threshhold which for this drive is 3 it will not be a problem. The drive has a 3 year warranty so if I were you I would just keep a check on it. If you see anotherone you should probably call sandisk support for warranty replacement. 

3

A few bad blocks early on in the SSD’s life is generally not a serious problem.

As long as this number doesn’t continue progressing over the next few weeks, it is simply the controller weeding out a few weak NAND blocks.

One of my Sandisk Extreme 240gig drives has a reallocated block with no ill effects.

A Sandisk Extreme 120gig I endurance tested, recorded a few bad blocks with around 20TiB Host Writes, but then went on to write almost 1PiB host writes before dying.