Most of you guys know i built a new PC earlier this year. Everything has been running without issues so far. Anyway, i always check the S.M.A.R.T status of my HDDs weekly and yesterday i discovered this on the main HD: So it seems that 8 sectors are with problems. Should i be worried? This HDD is less than a 1 year old and i haven't noticed any performance issues. The computer boots without issues or delays. If i didn't check the S.M.A.R.T status, i would not be able to say anything wrong about it. Still, looking on the internet, these two seem to be some of the very risky problems, including eletromechanical damage to the HDD itself. Should i just buy another one and send this to RMA? The warranty is valid till February 2014. This HDD has two partitions, one for the OS / programs and the other for games / emulators. All my important files are already on backup, but i really don't want to be surprised with it dying when i need to use my computer.
i've been lucky with HDD's the one from my 1st real build is still working as are the ones from my previous few builds, my brother has not had such luck with WD samsung and seagate drives lol, i do have a WD external 1TB usb drive which has been excellent so far. i like to use hitachi hard drives in my builds as i've had the best experience with them and to date have had none fail. especially not in the 1st year. RMA the drive if you can
Thanks for the answers. I'll try to buy a new HDD this weekend (tomorrow is Republic Day) and then RMA it.
Mine has been saying imminent failure for months, I actually scanned it and found only one bad block. Anyone more well versed on this can provide any insight?
back anything up you need, turn smart off and run it till it dies. i used a dodgy 200gb drive for an xbox(original) softmod and it seems to be running for now. so thats where it'll stay till it dies
^ I've used Clonezilla with good results. It just takes forever for a slow dyeing HDD to copy over 150 gb of data to one connected by USB 2.0 on a line the computer thinks is 1.1...
Nah, I meant for checking hard drive health. I've used some before and one said critical failure, the other was like 90% health. I've cloned a few drives and clonezilla does seem the way to go about it
I use Hard Disk Sentinel Pro for monitoring the status of the hard drives (both internal and extenal drives). As for attempting to repair, there are two tools out there that I know of but haven't had the change to try them: HDD Regenerator and Spinrite.
Hey guys, the strangest thing just happened. Since i wouldn't be able to buy a new HDD till saturday and today is a holiday down here, i had to keep using my home computer. Anyway, i check the S.M.A.R.T status once again with Crystal Disk Info and now it doesn't report any sectors with problems. Both the C5 and C6 are back to normal and the raw value went back to 0. Curiously none were added to Reallocated Sector Count: Also the Read Error Rate went down by 10. So, now what? Was it a false alarm? The HDD reported sector errors and fixed itself? Like i said, i never noticed any performance issues, weird noises or boot problems. I'm really lost right now.
I'd be wary and still make sure everything is backed up. I know from experience. Hate to be the harbinger of bad news but right before I had a drive failure it seemed to pick up in performance and report no errors. I chuck this up to the firmware getting wonky from all the errors the drive has most likely from either bad drive platters, corrupted firmware, or both. Seems that right before fatal melt down the drives say "YAY! I'm doing better now! You can't throw me out! I'M WORKING FINE!!" *Click, click, sputter, DIE!* True story...
Everything is on backups already. That HDD is only for OS, programs, games and emulators. I was saving for a SSD so i'll keep checking this HDD daily. If i do find a cheap deal for an HDD this weekend then i'll buy it and replace it.
I had a 320gb hdd and was running linux mint on it, right from the start SMART reported a few bad sectors. Over time it only just got worse, especially as the hdd was getting more and more full. The last 20gb torrent I tried to download made it crash constantly, so I backed up and replaced it. Monitor your hdd but if it's got bad sectors it's only a matter of time. Mine lasted a year
It depends on source of those bad blocks. Sometimes you can get a bad block on hdd just with power loss or faulty data cable. In this case there's nothing to worry about and usually it's all about backup and erasing drive with some kind of maintenance utility. Bad blocks will disappear, because it's software errors. If your hdd was hit by something during operation in most cases bad blocks wii appear. But it doesn't always mean that it will be dead. For example my PowerBook fell from the table and it was a vacation far away from nearest store, so buying a new hdd wasn't an option for more than 2 months. I just wrote a bash script that reads all files with just 2 retry attempts and when it fails it puts this file in list. Then all files in list were erased (most of them were music files, nothing to worry about) and hdd went through filling with a lot of small 20k files until it's full then reading each file with skip on errors, secure erasing them (60 random rewrites for each of those files) in a cycle for about 100 hours. After this procedure i got 216 reallocated sectors and whole drive copied to /dev/null without errors. It's 8 years and still 216 sectors. But if you got a good PSU, good cables (no UDMA errors in SMART), hdd isn't overheating, you didn't play rugby with your drive instead of ball and still getting pending or reallocated sectors - your drive won't last long.
