Is my drive dying? S.M.A.R.T Flagged

[itakey]

Is my drive dying? The S.M.A.R.T. reporting only shows one issue as :
Reallocated Sector Count
Current: 199
Worst: 199
Threshold: 144
Raw Values: 000000000001

Does this mean only 1 sector is reallocated?

Is this enough of an issue or red flag to no longer trust the drive?

It is a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB I've had running for quite some time. This number hasn't changed, and I actually have over 40,000 power on hours logged on this drives run time.

 

[Elixer]

Is my drive dying? The S.M.A.R.T. reporting only shows one issue as :
Reallocated Sector Count
Current: 199
Worst: 199
Threshold: 144
Raw Values: 000000000001

Does this mean only 1 sector is reallocated?

Is this enough of an issue or red flag to no longer trust the drive?

It is a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB I've had running for quite some time. This number hasn't changed, and I actually have over 40,000 power on hours logged on this drives run time.

It is a good time to backup.
Usually, when you start having bad sectors, it spreads, but there is no time frame on this, could be weeks or months.

If it was me, I would get a new HD, and regulate this one to a scratch drive, unless you keep constant backups or you don't mind data loss, then, you can continue to use it, until it finally dies out on you.

 

[itakey]

It is a good time to backup.
Usually, when you start having bad sectors, it spreads, but there is no time frame on this, could be weeks or months.

If it was me, I would get a new HD, and regulate this one to a scratch drive, unless you keep constant backups or you don't mind data loss, then, you can continue to use it, until it finally dies out on you.

Thanks for the honest and hard truth. I keep backups, but this drive is a main drive in my data collection that only gets backed up 2 times a week. Guess I will plan accordingly and plan to shuffle this one out. Heck, I've owned it for....I don't know, 4-5 years, I'd say I got my money's worth.

If it stays at only 1 reallocated sector, does that mean it is stable and can be trusted?

 

[Charlie98]

I have a Seagate 500GB portable HDD that showed 8 bad sectors. It freaked me out at the time (it was my sole backup drive) but the sector count never went up for the next 2 years. I'm guessing I did something stupid with it, like bumping it while writing or such. I think it's up to 14 bad sectors now, with something like 24K hours on it, and it is no longer the primary backup drive. I still use it, but for non-critical storage.

Elixir is correct, time to plan on replacing it, but I would continue to use it as a backup drive or something (2 is better than one) until it really starts to go. I don't think it's a bad drive, or is going bad... but luck favors the prepared.

 

[Gabornski]

1 reallocated sector is not normally cause for alarm. Over time most hard drives will see a few. I would monitor it though and if you see it rising then it is time to replace.

 

[crashtech]

Spinners (HDDs) do that pretty often. They are commodities now, so when they screw up, I clone them, shred them and trash them.

 

[Brado78]

Hello, A pending Sector is usually the result of a piece of corrupted data on the sector. Viruses, Malware can cause these to some degree. since your drive is a Western Digital I can help you , In these cases the sectors do repair themselves. There are Three SMART values to watch. 1 Raw Read Error Rate. This keeps track of how many times bad data is read from the disk. This is the most important one 196 Reallocation Even Count. This monitors the "Pool" of spare sectors that have been remapped. 197 Current Pending Sector Count tells you how many sectors are in trouble. When attribute 197 goes back to 0, Look at attribute 196 If this is still 0 you're drive is healthy. I couldn't tell you how many drives we got back with this error.

WD tech

 

[mikeymikec]

Hello, A pending Sector is usually the result of a piece of corrupted data on the sector. Viruses, Malware can cause these to some degree. since your drive is a Western Digital I can help you , In these cases the sectors do repair themselves.

Entirely wrong (or perhaps worded in a fashion that is very easy to misinterpret).

Data can be corrupted in quite a few ways that have nothing to do with hardware; for example a bug in a piece of software could cause it to write data to a file in an incorrect manner ('incorrect' being incompatible with whatever format that file type is normally expected to be written in), which causes the software problems the next time it tries to read data from that file. Sectors do not get marked as bad because of corrupted data, they get marked as bad because the sector cannot be read normally (which the OS may consider to be 'corrupted data' when a read request fails). No software I'm aware of can cause bad sectors (unless maybe it's somehow allowed direct access to the drive head - which I'm not sure is even possible). Sectors cannot repair themselves; If the HDD spots a bad sector, it will try and recover data from that sector, copy it to another sector, then mark the sector as bad / not to be used again.

A 'pending sector' is one that has been spotted as 'bad' but the drive hasn't gone through the full routine of trying to recover data from it and mark it as bad / not to be used again.

----

As for the situation of 'what to do about this possibly iffy HDD' is up to you. One universal piece of advice is always:

Make sure your valuable data is backed up onto another storage device.

After that, would this drive failing be a real inconvenience to you or just an irritation? Consider how long it would take you to get a replacement drive and any work required to replace the old with the new.

If it's just an irritation, then you might want to wait for if/when the drive starts presenting you with more problems.

If it would be a real inconvenience if the drive failed unexpectedly, then I would advise replacing it ASAP before that happens.

For my own computer, I ran a Seagate drive for a fair few months after I spotted iffy SMART readings (which weren't the result of problems I noticed, just a routine check). I eventually replaced the drive because it was having problems resuming from hibernation (which disappeared after I did a full chkdsk, so the bad sectors were spotted and added to Windows's bad sector list and so weren't used again).

 

[Elixer]

Entirely wrong (or perhaps worded in a fashion that is very easy to misinterpret).

Data can be corrupted in quite a few ways that have nothing to do with hardware; for example a bug in a piece of software could cause it to write data to a file in an incorrect manner ('incorrect' being incompatible with whatever format that file type is normally expected to be written in), which causes the software problems the next time it tries to read data from that file. Sectors do not get marked as bad because of corrupted data, they get marked as bad because the sector cannot be read normally (which the OS may consider to be 'corrupted data' when a read request fails). No software I'm aware of can cause bad sectors (unless maybe it's somehow allowed direct access to the drive head - which I'm not sure is even possible). Sectors cannot repair themselves; If the HDD spots a bad sector, it will try and recover data from that sector, copy it to another sector, then mark the sector as bad / not to be used again.

A 'pending sector' is one that has been spotted as 'bad' but the drive hasn't gone through the full routine of trying to recover data from it and mark it as bad / not to be used again.

+1.

I couldn't tell you how many drives we got back with this error.

It IS a legitimate error though, pretending that just because the HD is going to map it out that it isn't a error anymore is questionable.

What is more worrying is when the HD dies with NO indications from SMART at all.

 

[Cerb]

Hello, A pending Sector is usually the result of a piece of corrupted data on the sector. Viruses, Malware can cause these to some degree. since your drive is a Western Digital I can help you , In these cases the sectors do repair themselves.

Those cases do not create bad data, as far as the disk is concerned, like pending or reallocated sector, unless we're talking about some malware that actually infects the disk firmware.

There are Three SMART values to watch. 1 Raw Read Error Rate. This keeps track of how many times bad data is read from the disk.

Every drive is going to have a high value for that one, and that is not a problem. As long as on-the-fly ECC can get the right data, all is well. Offline uncorrectable is the one that corresponds with pending and reallocated sectors.

 

[itakey]

Thanks to everyone for your replies, all very helpful in understanding this somewhat subjective topic since the results may mean a lot of different things it seems.

Hello, A pending Sector is usually the result of a piece of corrupted data on the sector. Viruses, Malware can cause these to some degree. since your drive is a Western Digital I can help you , In these cases the sectors do repair themselves. There are Three SMART values to watch. 1 Raw Read Error Rate. This keeps track of how many times bad data is read from the disk. This is the most important one 196 Reallocation Even Count. This monitors the "Pool" of spare sectors that have been remapped. 197 Current Pending Sector Count tells you how many sectors are in trouble. When attribute 197 goes back to 0, Look at attribute 196 If this is still 0 you're drive is healthy. I couldn't tell you how many drives we got back with this error.

WD tech

So looking at those extra reports you mentioned, my results are as follows:
Read Error Rate: Raw Value of 0
Relocation Event Count: Raw Value of 1
Current Pending Sectors: Raw Value of 0

So is that basically saying the 1 sector is corrupt or moved, and that it only attempted to write it once, and nothing is pending, so it is stable?

Entirely wrong (or perhaps worded in a fashion that is very easy to misinterpret).

Data can be corrupted in quite a few ways that have nothing to do with hardware; for example a bug in a piece of software could cause it to write data to a file in an incorrect manner ('incorrect' being incompatible with whatever format that file type is normally expected to be written in), which causes the software problems the next time it tries to read data from that file. Sectors do not get marked as bad because of corrupted data, they get marked as bad because the sector cannot be read normally (which the OS may consider to be 'corrupted data' when a read request fails). No software I'm aware of can cause bad sectors (unless maybe it's somehow allowed direct access to the drive head - which I'm not sure is even possible). Sectors cannot repair themselves; If the HDD spots a bad sector, it will try and recover data from that sector, copy it to another sector, then mark the sector as bad / not to be used again.

A 'pending sector' is one that has been spotted as 'bad' but the drive hasn't gone through the full routine of trying to recover data from it and mark it as bad / not to be used again.

----

As for the situation of 'what to do about this possibly iffy HDD' is up to you. One universal piece of advice is always:

Make sure your valuable data is backed up onto another storage device.

After that, would this drive failing be a real inconvenience to you or just an irritation? Consider how long it would take you to get a replacement drive and any work required to replace the old with the new.

If it's just an irritation, then you might want to wait for if/when the drive starts presenting you with more problems.

If it would be a real inconvenience if the drive failed unexpectedly, then I would advise replacing it ASAP before that happens.

For my own computer, I ran a Seagate drive for a fair few months after I spotted iffy SMART readings (which weren't the result of problems I noticed, just a routine check). I eventually replaced the drive because it was having problems resuming from hibernation (which disappeared after I did a full chkdsk, so the bad sectors were spotted and added to Windows's bad sector list and so weren't used again).

Good real world advise. Guess i'll be preparing to swap these drives out and use them for secondary backups of backups, or something like that. I've run both of these drives for a LONG time so i've gotten my money's worth and then some.

 

[Elixer]

You know, 40K hours is around 4.5 years... those have a 5 year warranty, so, RMA it, and leave a post it note with this thread's url for the WD tech.

 

[itakey]

You know, 40K hours is around 4.5 years... those have a 5 year warranty, so, RMA it, and leave a post it note with this thread's url for the WD tech.

Just checked, I bought it on 01/05/2010. That would have been a slick move though if it was in the time frame.