Is this hdd dieing?

IceShock

IceShock

IceShock

Soldato
Joined
16 Dec 2005
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Halifax W'Yorkshire
Hey there, right I have pretty much no knowledge of hard drives etc apart from I plug them in and they either work or they don't, I just got hold of a 750gb hard drive that came out of a old scrap computer, and I thought, ill use that to store my movies etc on as my 1tb data/documents hard drive is getting pretty full, and my external hard drive which I use for backups, well, that's got about 100mb left out of its 1tb.

I just fired up crystaldiskinfo, I get a caution with the 750gb, but I don't know anything about what its telling me, could someone please explain? :p

thanks

Heres images of whats happening, first picture is the 750gb drive, the second is my boot ssd, third is my data drive:

hdd.jpg

image.jpg

image.jpg
 
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Given it's age it's not that bad, the reallocated sectors are where is finds blocks it can't read/write to and remaps them to backup sectors.

Probably a good idea to run HD tune benchmark, see if there are any dips in performance and then run the full slow Error Scan to see if any live blocks are damaged.
 
Difficult to say TBH - the bad blocks could have been there for a very long time and the disk is stable, or alternatively they could be a recent symptom of a dying drive.

The 'pending sector count' says how many sectors have had read errors but haven't been remapped yet, which on an older drive suggests they may be recent and that there could be many more bad sectors waiting to be found when they are next accessed.

I'd suggest running a full (long) test a few times using the manufacturer's diagnostics tool. If the disk seems ok and you use it then keep an eye on the smart data for further pending/remapped sectors which would indicate a developing problem, but keep backups whatever :)
 
I would be looking to replace the 750GB drive as a matter of urgency. If you have important data on it, I'd back it up as soon as possible to help prevent data loss.

When a drive develops bad sectors, it's quite often a downward spiral until the drive is no longer usable. For this reason alone, I don't trust a harddrive with one or more bad sectors.

I'd download HD Tune and run a thorough error scan (untick quick). This should show you any bad blocks on the drive. When it's complete, you can use the speed map to highlight slow areas of the harddrive, which could be a weak area of the drive.
 
iv ran HD tune, and weirdly, its not come up with any damaged bits on the error scan :confused: lol. but also, on crystaldiskinfo, the raw value has gone from 33 in the picture yesterday, to 34 today. so does that mean it has lost another sector?
 
ah, I had it on quick scan, ill run a full scan now, doh, my bad :p at the end of the day, I was only going to put some dvds and junk on like downloaded drivers and patches for games iv picked up over the years, nothing important nothing that I couldn't re-download. just stuff that I don't want clogging up my 1TB drive that I have all my programs and documents on.

I might just stop being a tight arse, and buy my self a 3TB drive to replace my 1TB drive, then ill have no problems :p and if money can stretch, another 3TB to backup my stuff.
 
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2 hrs 21 mins into the scan, its picked up 89 errors, and the raw calues of the realocated sector counts has gone up to 36 from 33 that it was yesterday and 34 a few hours ago, so im guessing the drive is ready for the bin then? also on speed map, first 500gb was all green was scanning for errors at 100mb/s now its down to 0.2mb/s lol
 
That could take days to complete at that rate :eek:. Time to get yourself a new drive and at least one more for backups methinks.
 
With that level of errors I'd not use it for anything more that testing stuff.

If the errors start some way in you can partition it up to that position.
I have a few old drives like this for testing.
 
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