Pending sectors increased to 31, then DECREASED to 14?? I also need tips for drive maintenance software

[figit090]

I thought my WD Black 2tb drive was dying, slowly gaining one and then another pending sector value every other day. eventually the "uncorrectable sector count" went to 1 as well.

Today as I was transferring data to the drive in a backup situation, and the pending sector values climbed faster from about 15 or so to a "1F", or 31 according to a hex conversion chart

Now, after the transfer completed, it quickly fell back down to 14 for the "pending sector count" value, and uncorrectable has never changed from a value of 1 this entire time that I have seen.

I read this thread and other pages saying that perhaps this kind of error is a file-system error or a power surge, something other than physical disk damage that is causing errors in sectors, since reallocation or uncorrectable sector values are not increasing as my pending sectors decrease. It's as if the problem went away, it wasn't remapped.

Frankly I'm confused and not sure what to do. I was going to buy a new 3tb drive to mirror my (now main storage) 3tb external drive and put the 2tb through it's paces with 1&0's but I dunno what's going on.

While we're on the topic, what's a good disk maintenance program, and how good is spinrite? I don't want to spend a ton on programs but I would like to maintain my data as it is critical for my business.

 

[noidea_77]

The pending sector count tells you that your hdd is dieing. It increases when a sector can not be read and has to be reallocated to a spare area of the disk. That happens with the next write operation to this sector. No matter what, the data from the original sector was lost and that will happen to other sectors a well very fast. I'm pretty sure, a bunch of sectors of your current data can not be read as well.

 

[figit090]

but how would you explain that the number went down without going somewhere else, like reallocated or uncorrectable?

EDIT: it's now at "1A" for pending sectors... that's confusing. I'm using crystal disk info

I'm doing a HD Tune error scan and it has already returned some damaged area so it appears I might in fact have a dying drive. :/ bummer is i've run this scan before I think and it returned all Ok.

 

[noidea_77]

Reallocating the pending (damaged) sectors to the spare area will of cause lower the number. By reading more files from the disk, it will discover more damaged sectors and increase the pending count again. HD Tune will only report the pending sectors. It doesn't see the already reallocated sectors.