My hard disk drive reports 65536 bad sectors.

Apr 12, 2018
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Hi, I have a 250GB hard disk drive which I bought in 2006. It never had any problem.

Yesterday I installed Hard Disk Sentinel and the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic of the program says that there are 65536 bad sectors on the drive, which is exactly the max length of a 16 bit number.

Should I be worried or is it just a reporting error of SMART? Thanks for any answers.
 

RolandJS

Reputable
Mar 10, 2017
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Have you been making routine backups of the OS and Data partitions onto external media before this situation happened? If yes, find, download, run manufacturer's diagnostic software - and go from there. If no backup, make backups with Verify=On real soon, the run manufacturer's diagnostics.
 
Apr 12, 2018
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Thanks, I will run Seagate's diagnostic tool and see what it comes up with. And yes, my OS and data are fully backed up.

 
Apr 12, 2018
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Thanks for the reply, do you think a new drive will be faster than my current one? Does a hard drive's performance degrade over time?
 
Apr 12, 2018
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Unfortunately Seagate's SeaTools utility could not detect my drive.
I have also tried Acronis Drive Monitor and it says the disk's health is at 17% while Hard Disk Sentinel says that it's at 3%. They report different findings, strange...
 


As long as it's 7200RPM it should be fast, which most modern day hard drives are.