Skype crash and disk errors - a cautionary tale

Question

Skype crashed (again) hanging the whole computer. Forced shutdown: restarted in single-user mode and ran Applejack. Reported a number of overlapping files. Nasty.
Ran DiskWarrior. It reported 197,192 overlapping files and hung. I thought about it a bit, re-ran Applejack and flushed the caches. This left only a couple of minor errors which were easily repaired.
Presumably Skype messed up its own cache files (197,000 though...!). Anyway, despite what Applejack's instructions say, it looks like it's worth clearing the caches before doing a disk repair - or at least before doing anything else if this sort of error shows up.

Answer 1

Most modern drives automatically map bad sectors during use. It is a transparent process. Just because the drive has bad sectors means nothing - practically every drive will have them. What would be disturbing is if the automatic sector mapping is failing and is not discovering the bum sectors. This is why once a drive starts to behave badly and DiskWarrior can''t fix it, I never trust it again.
If I keep it in use, about the only thing it's good for is a render scratch drive - that is - a drive that simply holds temp files. That way, when it dies, nothing serious is lost. Using it as your only back up, especially after it has given fair warning of going bad, would be ... um ... not smart.
Under the fwiw category, external drives can act flaky simple through dying power supplies. The drive mechanism may be fine but is being corrupted by intermittent or wavering voltage.
Also, I'm no fan of partitioning. ymmv.
Regards,
x