Is this drive going to fail soon?

[Guppy]

I've got a 1TB Hitachi drive that I haven't had any problems with but after a friends HD failed I thought I'd give mine a check so I got HD Tune Pro to check my drives. I was a little shocked to see it have 3 yellow warnings. Here is a screenshot of the results from the health check from HD Tune


Should I be buying a new drive?

Thanks guys.

[Zak33]

I thnk all drives look for bad sectors anyway and re allocate data to good areas.

does it show DATES? cos they might be from NEW!

[c12038]

Do you have BSOD or miss reads when accessing the HDD if so then your drive has a possible chance of failing i would seriously back up all important data ASAP......

[stevie lee]

my old C: drive (a 120GB IDE hitachi) I bought it in 2003. It had 3 reallocated sectors on it when i checked it back in 2010. i think they were caused when i did defragging and the power got turned off unexpectedly.

my dads still using it in his download machine, it still has 3 reallocated sectors, even after 9 years of heavy use. no BSODS, failed disk reads, nada, nowt. tough little blighters they are.


but still.. back up all your data, then monitor the drive over the next few weeks. and look to be purchasing another one for piece of mind.

[Guppy]

I haven't had any trouble with the drive in the past but I'd rather not go through the hassle of it failing any time soon. Sounds like buying another drive soon for peace of mind is probably my best course of action. Thanks again guys.

[Agent]

Bad sectors are only really an issue when they are growing. If the number is stable, the drive will just reallocate the data elsewhere (it even has spare sectors to account for this).

No manufacturing process is perfect. It's perfectly possible they have been there since you got the drive.

Get the UBCD, boot partition magic from it and read the SMART data. See if there is anything recent in there.

[peterb]

Don't think there is anything to worry about from that data (which looks as if it has been obtained from the drive's SMART data)

However, it is a mechanical device, and it will fail one day, but that won't be a problem, because you will be able to restore all your critical and irreplaceable stuff from your backup(s)....




won't you?

[watercooled]

As above, you should be backing up anyway, but I wouldn't be too worried about that drive. I recently picked up a few error statistics on my SSD because of a cheap rubbish ebay SATA power splitter, either a loose connection or dropping voltage too much through the super thin wires when my HDD was spinning up.

Still, it wouldn't be a bad idea to run a full surface scan (chkdsk /r) , then check SMART again when it's done.

If you're into Linux, you could also try badblocks in non-destructive read/write mode (badblocks -nvs).

chkdsk /r is read-only, badblocks -nvs also writes, so is more thorough, but probably not necessary here

Either way, scanning the disk surface should cause the HDD itself to spot any bad sectors, reallocate them, and report it to SMART.