Reallocated sector count? Should I be weary of my hard drive?

[oostab]

So I recently installed cyrstal disk info, and upon first firing it up, it gave me caution. It says i have "100" in reallocated sector counts, however I have no idea what that means. Should I be worried or what? any help would be appreciated.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey ostab. This is a bit tricky. The reallocated sectors count is the number of bad sectors which the program managed to move the data from and exclude them as usable anymore. What's the number of the pending sectors? Unfortunately when bad sectors start to occur, this will continue until the drive eventually dies, but the bad thing is that you can't predict when this is going to happen. It could be a year from now or even days. If I were you, I'd do regular backups of the important data and also regular tests of the drive. Though the best option would be to replace it, but as I said you probably could end up using it for quite some time, or not so much... So at the end of it all, it's up to you how you'd like to proceed.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[oostab]

Hey ostab. This is a bit tricky. The reallocated sectors count is the number of bad sectors which the program managed to move the data from and exclude them as usable anymore. What's the number of the pending sectors? Unfortunately when bad sectors start to occur, this will continue until the drive eventually dies, but the bad thing is that you can't predict when this is going to happen. It could be a year from now or even days. If I were you, I'd do regular backups of the important data and also regular tests of the drive. Though the best option would be to replace it, but as I said you probably could end up using it for quite some time, or not so much... So at the end of it all, it's up to you how you'd like to proceed.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

Hmmm okay, and here is a screenshot of the pending sectors

 

[Boogieman_WD]

If you don't want to replace your drive just yet, probably the best thing to do is - get a new one and use this one as secondary storage or something until it fails. It doesn't look too bad for now, but as I said this could change in no time, so it's better to be safe than sorry.

 

[fzabkar]

@oostab, you appear to be confusing the "normalised" values of the SMART attributes with their "raw" values. The actual number of reallocated sectors is 19 (= 0x13 in hexadecimal).

The drive also has 4 Reported Uncorrectable Errors and 4 Command Timeouts. If it's a Seagate drive, then most of the other attributes are OK.

IMHO this drive should not be trusted with your data, but strictly speaking the SMART report alone will not entitle you to a warranty replacement.