Considering severity of HD S.M.A.R.T. readings

Question

I found out today that my laptop's HD threw a SMART error. I've gone through the motions and did an OS partition clone and backed up valuable data. This is a work machine and I'm on a very tight budget, so buying a replacement drive is prohibitive but not impossible granted I can demonstrate the drive is beyond help and an actual risk.

Here's what I've gathered:

• chkdsk /r takes a long while, 1:30 hours for a 120 GB partition
• The error does appear in the event log with some rather ominous messages, these came up while the system was suspended.

(These are loosely translated from Spanish):

(Disk) The controller detected that the device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 anticipated that an error will occur. Please perform a backup … yada yada

And

(DiskDiagnostic) Windows disk diagnostic detected a smart error in disk X (volumes C:\; D:\). There could be an error on the disk; please backup etc.

• The drive failed Speedfan long test

• This is the SMART reading

  Attribute              Current      Raw
  Raw Read Error Rate      99         000000030000
  Throughput Performance   100        000000000000
  Spin Up Time             230        000900000000
  Start/Stop Count         100        00000000029B
  Reallocated Sector Count 100        000000000000
  Seek Error Rate          100        000000000000
  Seek Time Performance    100        000000000000
  Power On Hours Count     82         000000001FAE
  Spin Retry Count         100        000000000000
  Power Cycle Count        100        000000000296
  GSense Error Rate        100        000000000000
  Power Off Retract Count  100        000000000012
  Load Cycle Count         95         00000000EA39
  Reallocated Event Count  100        000000000000
  Current Pending Sector   100        000000000008
  Offline Uncorrectable Sector Count  100         000000000000
  Ultra DMA CRC Error Rate 200        000000000000
  Load Retry Count         100        000000000000
  

• Reflect failed to make backups until I enabled file caching

• Boot, normal use and file transfers are fast as always.
• chkdsk (without extra paramenters) finds 4 KB in defective sectors

With all this considered, what do you think about this drive's health? I do know you can perform some tasks to force remapping (although this is a topic I'd need to research first), but what I don't know if this disk is in any position to be worth the fixes. I can provide any additional info needed for a better judgment.

I hope somebody can make something out of those weird stats!

Answer 1

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has some information that might be useful. In particular, they note five attributes that are strongly associated with impending disk failure:

• Reallocated Sectors Count
• Reported Uncorrectable Errors
• Command Timeout
• Current Pending Sector Count
• Uncorrectable Sector Count

In your case, the drive has a nonzero raw value for Current Pending Sector Count (see this question). This means that while the drive hasn't actually remapped any failed sectors, it has detected that some sectors may be bad and need to be remapped the next time they are accessed.

Your drive is likely to fail soon, so you should back up its contents and replace it as soon as possible.

Answer 2

This is a subjective question - because you want to know if you should continue to use the drive. We can't tell you if you should continue to use the drive - that is a decision you have to make yourself based on different factors such as the impact of downtime and data loss on your organization.

What is not subjective is what SMART is and what the error means.

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART) is a monitoring system included in computer hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs)1 that detects and reports on various indicators of drive reliability, with the intent of enabling the anticipation of hardware failures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

The SMART message you provided, loosely translated means "your drive is at risk for imminent failure" The system designed and calibrated by the manufacturer of your hard drive has detected that the drive has degraded beyond safe limits and that it's failure is IMMINENT.

https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=251

"Long Test" failures are an additional confirmation that the drive has sustained significant physical damage and will continue to degrade taking your data with it.

Your drive is failing and will destroy your data. You choose if you want to keep using it.