Advice regarding WD Elements HDD

daydr3am3r · 03 Oct 2013

Hi everybody,

Last year I bought a WD Elelemts 3.5" 2.5TB USB 2.0.
Everything was fine until 1 week ago when Crystal Disk Info reported 1 under Current Pending Sector Count.

This seamed very familiar to me since I had THIS problem before and then THIS.

This time the HDD seamed fine so I start backing up all my backups :)).

After I finished backing up everything I disconnected the HDD and a few hours later, after reconnecting the HDD Crystal Disk reported the HDD was fine [TROLL FACE].
I checked with HD Tune Pro and again, the HDD seamed fine.
However, when I opened Paragon Disk Manager the program hanged reporting I/O error on that HDD.

I connected the drive to another PC and the results were the same: all programs reported no errors except the I/O error reported by Paragon.

I can however copy/delete without any problems. So far, that is.

I still have to try WinDLG utility to see what it reports, as well as the Windows full HDD scan.

However, what are your thoughts on this? The HDD has only 3 months warranty left so I still can return it but I am not sure this will solve anything.

Is the HDD dying or not? Should I return the HDD?

marsmimar · 04 Oct 2013

I don't think a Raw Value of 1 for Current Pending Sector Count is anything to worry about. It's my understanding that HDDs already come with spare sectors in anticipation of having to replace bad sectors at some point during the hard drive's lifetime. I believe I also read somewhere that hard drives even leave the factory with bad sectors on them, and that's after passing the quality control checks. A few bad sectors are apparently acceptable by hard drive manufacturers when it comes to pass/fail factory standards. If the Current Pending Sector Count remains the same and doesn't show a sudden increase, the hard drive should be OK. But there are no guarantees. From a WD Forum:

Help! Current pending sector count warning - WD Community

Also, there's a free tool from PassMark called DiskCheckup Tool (post # 2) that you may be interested in trying.

Detrmining the size of the sector spare area

daydr3am3r · 04 Oct 2013

Thanks for your reply.

It's not that one sector that bothers me, especially since it doesn't even show up anymore.

It's the I/O error.
Since I first encounter that error in Paragon, event viewer is full of these: https://i.imgur.com/rEatFsu.png