[SOLVED] Reallocation Sector Count on hard drive.

[Max_Pare]

Hello, i've had an old HDD in my build for the past 2 years and a half, and the HDD was already something like 4 to 6 years old, today i ran a health check on it (using a free trusted software named HDDScan) and i got two warnings saying:

005: Reallocation Sector Count
Value: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 010

and

196: Reallocation Event Count
Value: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 000

I use this HDD for essentially everything except OS, which is on my SSD instead.
I've read online that "Reallocation Events" are a bad thing, so i supposed i should get a new HDD. I would like to get a 2TB Hard disk for a decent price, but also decent quality (so just an average hard drive), could you point me towards a good HHD to replace this one with?
I see people reccomending WD black 7200rpm hdd it's completely out of my budget, there are some 2tb hdds for 50-70$ but they're only 5200rpm and i dont know about running games off of that, maybe i should settle for 1TB 7200 rpm instead?

 

[Grobe]

If you have valuable files stored on disk, having backup is far more important than spending lot of cash on a single disk you hope will last forever.

 

[scout_03]

i use this and gaming https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...d black&cm_re=wd_black-_-22-236-625-_-Product also for the old hdd use is maker software to test it .

 

[mdd1963]

Some drives lose/reallocate a sector here and there gracefully, as I've seen one in an office computer show similar values, and the drive staid fine for 18 more months...

The first time you hope or assume that will be the case, is when you might very well have the drive be lost within hours or days instead...

Back up your most important stuff while you can....; if it turns out to be wasted time, great, at least you have your data backed up...

Quite few photos and docs can fit into even just the free accounts for Google Drive, DrobBox, OneDrive, Box, PCloud, etc...

 

[Max_Pare]

Some drives lose/reallocate a sector here and there gracefully, as I've seen one in an office computer show similar values, and the drive staid fine for 18 more months...

The first time you hope or assume that will be the case, is when you might very well have the drive be lost within hours or days instead...

Back up your most important stuff while you can....; if it turns out to be wasted time, great, at least you have your data backed up...

Quite few photos and docs can fit into even just the free accounts for Google Drive, DrobBox, OneDrive, Box, PCloud, etc...

The thing is that the two old crappy drives I have in my system are literally the only ones I have, I have no other way of backing up my data, and backing up to cloud is not an option since my upload speed is 60KBp/s and uploading ~1.5TB of data would literally take over 1200 years (I did the math).

 

[sauzer]

If your pc is almost 3 years old, a 5400 rpm hdd will run games fine, the bottleneck for you is the gpu and cpu. Its totally a waste of money to buy a 7200 for an old system.

And about your hdd failing, theres only one solution: buy a new one. Theres no magic trick to "save" your old hd... it could work for another year, but it could also stop working tomorrow... the only thing for sure is that the longer you use it, the sooner it fails. So, if you care about the stuff on it, buy a new one asap and copy everything there and, if possible, while you wait, dont use your pc. After that, you can even keep using it until it dies... just remember to keep the important stuff you cant get back on the new hd, and leave stuff like videogames or programs on the old one.

PS You should keep the stuff you really care on AT LEAST 2 hd. A lot of times hds stop working all of sudden, in that case you woudl've lost everything. You've been lucky, so dont risk again.

 

[Max_Pare]

If your pc is almost 3 years old, a 5400 rpm hdd will run games fine, the bottleneck for you is the gpu and cpu. Its totally a waste of money to buy a 7200 for an old system.

And about your hdd failing, theres only one solution: buy a new one. Theres no magic trick to "save" your old hd... it could work for another year, but it could also stop working tomorrow... the only thing for sure is that the longer you use it, the sooner it fails. So, if you care about the stuff on it, buy a new one asap and copy everything there and, if possible, while you wait, dont use your pc. After that, you can even keep using it until it dies... just remember to keep the important stuff you cant get back on the new hd, and leave stuff like videogames or programs on the old one.

Well, I did say my system is nearly 3 years old but didn't mention I have replaced most of the components in the past year or so. Currently I have an i5 7600 4ghz, 8gb ddr4 2.4Ghz ram and a gtx 1060 6GB OC, so there isn't much of a bottle neck. Most games run decently from the HDD (decently as in load times etc.), but large games like Battlefield, The Witcher, Fortnite and even Path of Exile take absolutely ages to load, and even when the map is loaded, the textures and models are super low resolution and it takes another 30 seconds to 2 minutes to actually load completely, plus some stuttering here and there when loading new areas, and I know that the bottleneck is the HDD because ever since I've put these very games on a SSD they load lightning fast and stuttering is a thing of the past now. I guess I will try and get a cheap-ish 5400rpm HDD and do some testing, and if it really sucks I will just refund it and wait for a better deal on a 7200rpm drive. Thanks for your input.

 

[Solandri]

Reallocated sectors are usually normal as a drive gets older. Manufacturers know parts of the drive which hold data will fail as it ages. So they add a few thousand spare sectors at the end of the drive. When a regular sector stops working, the drive updates its firmware to use a spare (reserve) sector in its place. From then on, every time the drive would read or write data to the bad sector, it uses the reserve sector instead. The reallocated sector count is just the number of sectors which have been mapped to reserve sectors. The reallocated event count is how many sectors the drive thinks may need mapping.

So it's normal for these counts to be high in an old drive. What you need to watch out for is if these counts suddenly increase by a lot. That's usually a sign the drive is dying. In that case, replacing the drive is your only option.

If you don't have much money and the OS is on a SSD, then a 5400 RPM hard drive should be fine. (Avoid the WD 5400 RPM drives - they have a head parking issue which can make games stutter. That pretty much limits you to Seagate or Toshiba. HGST drives are also good - even though they merged with WD, they're older Hitachi designs which don't have the head parking issue.)

Sequential speeds (speed at which large files are read/written) is more a function of how new the HDD is. The newer drives write data at a higher density. So a single rotation of the drive platter contains more data than a single rotation of an older drive. So a new 5400 RPM drive can be faster than an old 7200 RPM drive for large files.

4k speeds (speed at which small files are read/written) are more dependent on the RPM. The drive positions the heads in the proper track, then has to wait for the correct part of the platter to rotate under the heads. 7200 RPM drives rotate 33% faster than 5400 RPM drives, so their 4k speeds are 33% faster. But 7200 RPM drives still top out at about 1 MB/s (1.5 MB/s if you enable NCQ). A SSD can typically hit 30-70 MB/s 4k speeds, which is why it's so important to have your OS on a SSD.

Likewise, while the 7200 RPM drive will be faster for games than a 5400 RPM drive, it will only be 33% faster at most. If you're concerned about the speed of loading your games, you are far, far better off saving money by getting a 5400 RPM drive, and using the saved money to help buy a SSD in the future. Then put the games on the SSD.

If your current SSD has enough extra space and you use Steam for games, Steam allows you to put games on multiple drives. Just move the game you're currently playing to the SSD. When you finish or lose interest in the game, move it back to the HDD. Move your next game to the SSD.

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/steam-libraries-on-multiple-drives.2450763/

If you don't use Steam and install the games directly on the D: drive (HDD), but you have extra space on the C: drive (SSD), tell me. There's a trick you can do using something called directory junctions which can make Windows think a game is on your D: drive, even if you've temporarily moved it to the C: drive.

The bigger concern is that you are running without backups. You really should be making backups, at least of your most-essential data. If you need, you can use a flash drive to copy your most important data, then take your friend's laptop to a place with fast Internet and back up your data to the cloud. Or if your phone has some storage, you can copy to that, go someplace with fast WiFi, and re-upload it to the cloud like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.

 

[Max_Pare]

Reallocated sectors are usually normal as a drive gets older. Manufacturers know parts of the drive which hold data will fail as it ages. So they add a few thousand spare sectors at the end of the drive. When a regular sector stops working, the drive updates its firmware to use a spare (reserve) sector in its place. From then on, every time the drive would read or write data to the bad sector, it uses the reserve sector instead. The reallocated sector count is just the number of sectors which have been mapped to reserve sectors. The reallocated event count is how many sectors the drive thinks may need mapping.

So it's normal for these counts to be high in an old drive. What you need to watch out for is if these counts suddenly increase by a lot. That's usually a sign the drive is dying. In that case, replacing the drive is your only option.

If you don't have much money and the OS is on a SSD, then a 5400 RPM hard drive should be fine. (Avoid the WD 5400 RPM drives - they have a head parking issue which can make games stutter. That pretty much limits you to Seagate or Toshiba. HGST drives are also good - even though they merged with WD, they're older Hitachi designs which don't have the head parking issue.)

Sequential speeds (speed at which large files are read/written) is more a function of how new the HDD is. The newer drives write data at a higher density. So a single rotation of the drive platter contains more data than a single rotation of an older drive. So a new 5400 RPM drive can be faster than an old 7200 RPM drive for large files.

4k speeds (speed at which small files are read/written) are more dependent on the RPM. The drive positions the heads in the proper track, then has to wait for the correct part of the platter to rotate under the heads. 7200 RPM drives rotate 33% faster than 5400 RPM drives, so their 4k speeds are 33% faster. But 7200 RPM drives still top out at about 1 MB/s (1.5 MB/s if you enable NCQ). A SSD can typically hit 30-70 MB/s 4k speeds, which is why it's so important to have your OS on a SSD.

Likewise, while the 7200 RPM drive will be faster for games than a 5400 RPM drive, it will only be 33% faster at most. If you're concerned about the speed of loading your games, you are far, far better off saving money by getting a 5400 RPM drive, and using the saved money to help buy a SSD in the future. Then put the games on the SSD.

If your current SSD has enough extra space and you use Steam for games, Steam allows you to put games on multiple drives. Just move the game you're currently playing to the SSD. When you finish or lose interest in the game, move it back to the HDD. Move your next game to the SSD.

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/steam-libraries-on-multiple-drives.2450763/

If you don't use Steam and install the games directly on the D: drive (HDD), but you have extra space on the C: drive (SSD), tell me. There's a trick you can do using something called directory junctions which can make Windows think a game is on your D: drive, even if you've temporarily moved it to the C: drive.

The bigger concern is that you are running without backups. You really should be making backups, at least of your most-essential data. If you need, you can use a flash drive to copy your most important data, then take your friend's laptop to a place with fast Internet and back up your data to the cloud. Or if your phone has some storage, you can copy to that, go someplace with fast WiFi, and re-upload it to the cloud like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.

Ah this is what I was looking for, thanks a lot. I guess I could backup the important stuff to my laptop and upload it to a cloud service through my friends who have optic fiber, as you suggested. My ssd is basically full, and I already have everything that needs to be on an SSD on it. I think I will move everything to the new 5400 rpm HDD and use the two old ones for backups but leave them unplugged unless i need them. Also, I found out about those two warnings just yesterday but as far as I know I they could have been there for years and years, so maybe it's not that bad, but then again in the past couple months I did notice a significant decrease in performance in read/write speeds so that might mean that the poor thing is close to the end of its life cycle.
Thanks again for the help.

 

[Max_Pare]

Reallocated sectors are usually normal as a drive gets older. Manufacturers know parts of the drive which hold data will fail as it ages. So they add a few thousand spare sectors at the end of the drive. When a regular sector stops working, the drive updates its firmware to use a spare (reserve) sector in its place. From then on, every time the drive would read or write data to the bad sector, it uses the reserve sector instead. The reallocated sector count is just the number of sectors which have been mapped to reserve sectors. The reallocated event count is how many sectors the drive thinks may need mapping.

So it's normal for these counts to be high in an old drive. What you need to watch out for is if these counts suddenly increase by a lot. That's usually a sign the drive is dying. In that case, replacing the drive is your only option.

If you don't have much money and the OS is on a SSD, then a 5400 RPM hard drive should be fine. (Avoid the WD 5400 RPM drives - they have a head parking issue which can make games stutter. That pretty much limits you to Seagate or Toshiba. HGST drives are also good - even though they merged with WD, they're older Hitachi designs which don't have the head parking issue.)

Sequential speeds (speed at which large files are read/written) is more a function of how new the HDD is. The newer drives write data at a higher density. So a single rotation of the drive platter contains more data than a single rotation of an older drive. So a new 5400 RPM drive can be faster than an old 7200 RPM drive for large files.

4k speeds (speed at which small files are read/written) are more dependent on the RPM. The drive positions the heads in the proper track, then has to wait for the correct part of the platter to rotate under the heads. 7200 RPM drives rotate 33% faster than 5400 RPM drives, so their 4k speeds are 33% faster. But 7200 RPM drives still top out at about 1 MB/s (1.5 MB/s if you enable NCQ). A SSD can typically hit 30-70 MB/s 4k speeds, which is why it's so important to have your OS on a SSD.

Likewise, while the 7200 RPM drive will be faster for games than a 5400 RPM drive, it will only be 33% faster at most. If you're concerned about the speed of loading your games, you are far, far better off saving money by getting a 5400 RPM drive, and using the saved money to help buy a SSD in the future. Then put the games on the SSD.

If your current SSD has enough extra space and you use Steam for games, Steam allows you to put games on multiple drives. Just move the game you're currently playing to the SSD. When you finish or lose interest in the game, move it back to the HDD. Move your next game to the SSD.

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/steam-libraries-on-multiple-drives.2450763/

If you don't use Steam and install the games directly on the D: drive (HDD), but you have extra space on the C: drive (SSD), tell me. There's a trick you can do using something called directory junctions which can make Windows think a game is on your D: drive, even if you've temporarily moved it to the C: drive.

The bigger concern is that you are running without backups. You really should be making backups, at least of your most-essential data. If you need, you can use a flash drive to copy your most important data, then take your friend's laptop to a place with fast Internet and back up your data to the cloud. Or if your phone has some storage, you can copy to that, go someplace with fast WiFi, and re-upload it to the cloud like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.

I found this "Seagate Hard-disk ST2000DM006 Barracuda Sata III 7200rpm 64MB" for around 60$, but by googling around people say that Seagate is the least reliable when it comes to Hard drives and that WD and Toshiba are better, but I guess that you get what you pay for, and 60$ is pretty cheap for 2TB 7200 rpm, what's your take?

 

[hang-the-9]

You can't spend $50 on a backup drive? Time and money spent on recovering lost data will be a lot more than that. You need the main drive for files and a backup drive for that. Unless you want to be one of those people that posts on here with "I lost my important files and need to recover them" when a small amount of money and time makes a failed drive trivial. Worrying about data after it's lost is too late.