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I had Windows running CHKDSK on a drive at boot recently, I had to cancel every time because it took more than a day once and I didn't have that much time. I immediately backed up the data and formatted the drive hoping it would go away.

It did, but I wanted to check if the drive was still okay. After seeing this question I installed CrystalDiskInfo and obtained these results:

SMART results via CrystalDiskInfo

Noting the Current Pending Sector Count and Uncorrectable Sector Count, I'd like some advice, particularly to the obvious questions:

  1. What does this mean for this drive? Googling/Wiki-ing it only leads to more HD jargon :(
  2. Should I even use this drive?
  3. Tools to fix?
  4. Would what ever issue it is be covered by warranty?
Community
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Jay Wick
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4 Answers4

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I would discard the drive and replace it as soon as possible. If it's still under warranty, I would get the manufacturer or the place you bought it from to replace it.

Current Pending Sector Count is a count of suspected bad sectors on the disk (a sector is a contiguous section of the drive). The drive attempted to write data to those sectors but it couldn't, so it wrote the data elsewhere and placed these sectors in reserve to be tested later. If the test is successful, they will go back into the pool of good sectors.

I had several new hard drives that showed increasing Current Pending Sector Counts. The count would be fixed at one value for a few hours or a day, then it would jump up to a higher value and stay there for a few more hours or so. Believing that the pending sectors might turn out to be good, I continued using the drives. Each drive failed within a week, losing data. Since these were brand new drives I was able to get them replaced by RMA from the site I ordered from.

juggler
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When a sector is bad, your hard drive attempts to remap it to a spare sector (subsequent write request to the bad sector would be redirected to the remapped spare sector).
From your screenshot, Pending Sector Count indicate 0xB8=184 sectors waiting to be reallocated,
and Uncorrectable Sector Count indicate 0xA7=167 sectors that failed to be reallocated.

This isn't a good thing - it means possible physical damage, and your drive doesn't seem to be able to work around it.

If it's under warranty, I believe its RMA-able (this is the sort of failure that happens from regular use), but depends on the make of the drive - if its a seagate/maxtor drive, running seatools will tell you if you can get it swapped If Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics will identify an issue and provide details needed to RMA

Dave M
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Journeyman Geek
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Running a full scan disk allows the operating system and hard drive controller to know where the current bad sectors are, and thus to route data elsewhere on the platters.

You shouldn't use this as your critical backup drive, or probably as your OS drive either. As a secondary data/program disk it should be just fine. Just keep it backed up.

music2myear
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Download and install Speedfan 4.44

Run Speedfan and go to the S.M.A.R.T. tab, select your hard drive from the Hard Disk drop down box, then click the "perform an in depth online analysis of this hard disk"

This will take you to a web page that will explain your SMART values.

enter image description here

Moab
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