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I have a WD 2TB drive, a good 10 years old now. Needless to say it has been slowly failing, and getting slower. After testing and determining that the long response times are unfixable, I moved all my data to a new drive, then I long formatted the drive.

I probably should have checked just before moving all my data to a new drive, but I loaded up Crystal Disk Info, and here are the results

I'm a little confused about the discrepancy between the highlighted drive results and the listed results below, but not only am I inclined to trust the highlighted results, but on the safer side they are higher. If anyone could explain the discrepancy, I'd also appreciate it. Anyways, my actual questions are:

  1. I long formatted (all zeroes) the drive, why are there still pending sectors? As I understand, those are sectors that the drive will stop using when it has a backup sector to write that sector's data to. But if it is all zeroes, it shouldn't have to reallocate that sector.

  2. The total amount of bad sectors (reallocated, pending, and uncorrectable sectors) is 1148, which comes out to 574 MB (out of 2 TB). I know that any bad sectors means that more are likely to come, however this drive has had bad sectors for a long time, and I'd like to use it as a temporary backup for my main drive so I can reinstall windows. If I understand correctly, not reading or writing to the drive often will make its last sectors last much longer.

However, new that I formatted the drive, it reports that 210 MB are taken up. I assume that it reports the bad sectors as used up, but that value is much smaller than I'd expect. Is the missing 364 MB the extra sectors on the drive, or did I make a mistake in assuming 512 bytes per sector? Also, would anyone have experience on how fast the remaining sectors will fail? Since only half a percent of the sectors have failed, I once again assume that the drive isn't quite on the brink of death that it first appears.

Ender of Games
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    The hard drive is failing, new bad sectors are popping up all the time, time to recycle the drive. – Moab Aug 01 '20 at 22:07
  • The new bad sectors are popping up very slowly. It had its first bad sectors in 2014. – Ender of Games Aug 01 '20 at 22:12
  • You need to do a disk surface test, not a format. – Keltari Aug 01 '20 at 22:19
  • What will a disk surface test do? Allow those bad sectors to be properly discarded? I was looking at another post that mentioned smartmontools, and I don't know if that is a "surface" test, but I'm looking at other tools for that now. I formatted it partially to get it ready for recycling, but I feel bad for throwing things out. I would like to use it to the absolute end of its useful life. – Ender of Games Aug 02 '20 at 00:39
  • It is the case that filesystem itself (e.g. NTFS) can also mark sectors as bad - see https://superuser.com/a/688764/265087 (although if this has happened this is very bad news as it means the disk was unable to hide the issue). If so the new writes to those areas would never happen until the next full format. However your pending sector count is very high... if it's steadily growing it suggests there is some region of the disk failed and the issue is spreading. I would urge you to do backups while you still can and save your effort and invest in a new hard disk... – Anon Aug 02 '20 at 20:32
  • I used a Ease US (spelling?) surface test, and it only found 7 or so bad sectors... Confusing once again, as these numbers are so low. I'm going to find another test for a 'second opinion'. I've ultimately decided to use it for some low access extra space and backup for reinstalling my OS that I'm doing soon, so if I ultimately made a huge mistake I'll be sure to post here. – Ender of Games Aug 05 '20 at 21:42

2 Answers2

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The total amount of bad sectors (reallocated, pending, and uncorrectable sectors) is 1148, which comes out to 574 MB [...]

I assume that it reports the bad sectors as used up, but that value is much smaller than I'd expect.

Your calculations are off by a thousand. Since a sector is 512 bytes, the total is actually 574 kB or about half a megabyte. (Although some disks come with 4 kB sectors, making it 4592 kB.)

Also reallocated sectors on magnetic HDDs are not actually "used up" or removed from your total space – their sector numbers been actually reassigned to a different physical location. All disks have a small amount of spare space reserved for this purpose which is not originally part of the total available space, with the reallocation being managed by the disk's firmware independently from any OS-level "formatting".

More likely that the ~200 MB is actually in use by the filesystem metadata, such as the master file table and the space bitmap. 0.1% of the total space sounds about usual for NTFS.

u1686_grawity
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  • Thanks for pointing out my mistake. I wanted to save my "found answer" for someone who would suggest and explain a surface test, but they put it in the comments. You did provide the most relevant and helpful information, so thank you. – Ender of Games Aug 05 '20 at 21:40
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At a certain stage the state may plausibly be such that the prior damage has mechanically damaged the surface of the disk, i.e. material has come lose and is spreading inside the box, causing new damage.

There is no way to recover from this state; scrap the disk.

Hannu
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