My hard drive says it is failing (S.M.A.R.T warning) 2 years ago

[michael.vaynard]

my hdd (a generic WD 5400 rpm 640GB hdd came with my Acer Aspire 4752) announced that it is dying on a windows 7 pop up 2 years ago. I run sentinel and it seems to confirm it. Since I have a backup on cloud and on a second tower, I reset windows which was chugging at the time and is unable to do anything as every 2 minutes or so it would either freeze before recovering moments later or outright bsod when trying to do some stuff too extreme apparently such as running crystaldiskinfo. After resetting windows 7, still got the same S.M.A.R.T warning so I remove partition and merge them into one and proceeding to upgrade for free from windows 7 to windows 10 pro. after I upgraded windows, the same darn hard drive occasionally chugs (which is apparently normal for a windows 10 on a hard drive) but it still works fine even after having the entire adobe cc suite installed and have since rendered several videos for me with that drive as the scratch disk. is the crystaldiskinfo, sentinel and S.M.A.R.T softwares all lied or windows 7 is faulty??? I can run the machine now and give you guys the ss of the diagnostics if needed but it runs fine. even faster than my grandmother's 1 year old Lenovo Yoga which happen to run a similar drive.although I noticed the maximum capacity has been decreased and once, windows 10 fails to boot and needed to be loaded back to the old saved whatever it is they do on the windows 10 diagnostic screen. also, it is obviously out of warranty since I bought it back in 2012.

 

[popatim]

Yes, give us a screenshot.

 

[michael.vaynard]

Yes, give us a screenshot.

here it is http://
some of the used to be problematic parts seems to turn back to green??? one of the used to be yellow parts are the read and write errors but it seems to fix itself after the windows reinstall???

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

If it was me I wouldn't delay --- replace that HDD now. In fact I would have replaced it when the SMART warning first appeared. You've ignored it for two years -- crazy. I could understand it if HDDs were mega expensive to replace.

 

[popatim]

From what I see in your screenshot, the drive ran into an issue where a bunch of sectors failed. The drive itself was able to recover the data and place it into spare sectors reserved just for that purpose. Those are the Reallocated Sectors you see in the image. 231 is usually in hexadecimal format which translates to 561 in decimal; that's a ton of failed sectors. That would have resulted in some really sluggish performance while the drive worked thru all those. What happens now is that the heads occasionally will have to move to the spare sector area instead when reading/writing, so sometimes you will notice a slight delay when accessing those since the data won't be all in a row.

I personally have no issue with your continued use of the drive as long as you understand that when it dies you will likely lose everything on it - which means you need to already have backed-up important things to other storage. This applies to brand new drives as well as 10 yr old ones or ones with 'issues'. Everything else can be re-installed.

 

[michael.vaynard]

From what I see in your screenshot, the drive ran into an issue where a bunch of sectors failed. The drive itself was able to recover the data and place it into spare sectors reserved just for that purpose. Those are the Reallocated Sectors you see in the image. 231 is usually in hexadecimal format which translates to 561 in decimal; that's a ton of failed sectors. That would have resulted in some really sluggish performance while the drive worked thru all those. What happens now is that the heads occasionally will have to move to the spare sector area instead when reading/writing, so sometimes you will notice a slight delay when accessing those since the data won't be all in a row.

I personally have no issue with your continued use of the drive as long as you understand that when it dies you will likely lose everything on it - which means you need to already have backed-up important things to other storage. This applies to brand new drives as well as 10 yr old ones or ones with 'issues'. Everything else can be re-installed.

yeah Its still working today with little to no penalties after a clean format of windows. it does have cut down maximum capacity but that is about it. also, the whole issue of read and write error vanish??? can that jsut vanish like that? the read and write errors?

 

[michael.vaynard]

If it was me I wouldn't delay --- replace that HDD now. In fact I would have replaced it when the SMART warning first appeared. You've ignored it for two years -- crazy. I could understand it if HDDs were mega expensive to replace.

since it is 2019 now, its about 3 years since first warning and just recently I did a windows 10 update to 1809 and it is still running fine

 

[ElectrO_90]

I'd run a Low Level Format on the drive and see if that helps.
But yeah, when it first came up it would have been under warranty probably and could have been swapped out.

 

[michael.vaynard]

I'd run a Low Level Format on the drive and see if that helps.
But yeah, when it first came up it would have been under warranty probably and could have been swapped out.

the first warning came in 2016 (the laptop was 4 years old then and have no warranty left) already did a format and it works wonders but I am still confused why the issues just magically disappear such as the read and write errors.

 

[popatim]

The HDD monitors its own health and repairs damage when it can by reallocating sectors.

When you formatted & reinstalled windows you basically replaced the damaged files and the HDD reallocated the damaged sectors to spares to leave you with with a working drive. As long as more damaged sectors do not crop up, especially in an area with data on it, then you won't see any more read & write errors. All those sectors have been reassigned to the spare area.

It's like having a diary; you're writing on page 21 when your pen leaks so you copy everything on it to page 23 and rip out & trash page 21. To you it's still complete/ contiguous but in reality pg 21 & 22 are bad and not available to the end user anymore.