Question 500 Bad sectors found in laptop HDD ?

[ronax-pro]

I bought my laptop in 2018 and today in 2022 my application start crashing due to missing files so I scanned for bad sectors and found around 300 bad sectors in 1 TB HDD.
Is my drive gonna fail or can I use it?
Spec- Asus R542UQ
1TB HDD/240GB SSD
Work I do in system is accounts, 3D CAD, & app development

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Bad sectors cannot be fixed and the number will steadily increase until the HDD becomes unusable. Definitley needs replacing ASAP.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Is my drive gonna fail or can I use it?

Please show screenshot from HDtune health.
(upload to imgur.com and post link)

 

[geofelt]

First, insure that you have a good external backup if you value anything on that HDD.

What is the make/model of the HDD?
Run the diagnostic app from the vendor for that brand.
WD is data lifeguard, seatools for seagate.
They can replace bad sectors if you have any spares left.

I would plan on replacing the HDD with a ssd.
About $100 for a 1tb ssd.
It will make a huge difference in performance.
You should be able to use a clone utility to copy your drive, such as it is.

 

[johnbl]

You can also download crystaldiskinfo.exe (google for it)
it will read the smart data from the drive and give you an idea of its health.

if you are running windows version 8.1 or above windows scans for bad spots on a drive and tries to recover the info before while the sector only produces CRC errors. It will read a sector that is going bad over and over and try to get a clean copy. If it gets a good copy it moves the data to a new spot on the drive and marks the old sector as bad. This process happen 5 minutes after the system goes idle. Sometimes people have the system sleep too fast and this process never keeps up. This method should help with errors related to minor drive wear but if you drop the drive you can pick up a bunch of bad sectors due to damage to from the heads hitting the disk or changes in alignment.

I only use SSD drives not but for older HDD drives the failure rates are something like 20% the first year, then 15% each year until the drive fails.
and the effect is cumulative. (data is maybe 15 years old)

windows doing the repair helps with the drive life but the repair means the drive looks healthy for a much longer time then at the end of life it fails faster.

note: you can read the drive smart info using a powershell script but the success is hit or miss. different vendors store the data in different ways. So, if you get a really strange result, you should try a different program to read the smart data.

 

[mdd1963]

the drive has already failed.

Get what you can from it, or , better yet, feel safe knowing you have kept steady backups elsewhere.

Replace the drive, which, at about $30-$35 per TB these days, is not all that painful...(better yet, get the SSD you should have had all along anyway... Samsung 870 EVO or Crucial MX500...generally, 500 GB is plenty for a laptop, so, only $65 or o...)

 

[USAFRet]

Is my drive gonna fail

Yes.
The only question is when. Tomorrow, or next year?

How is your backup situation?