hard drive reallocated sectors

i have 2 HDD's
which have what one says C8 sectors reallocated
and another says 268

they have stayed at that for over 2 years but every smart software says caution/warning and highlights reallocated sector count on them
the number hasnt changed for over 2 years but any software i use insists they have no health left (says 0 days) due to the reallocated sectors

should I be worried? or just ignore it?

Could the HDD's just might of been bumped when installing/removing them from previous computers?

their performance is fine and have no issues other than the smart data reporting

By default drives have unused sectors so when a bad block is found it maps it to the spare ones you don't see this it only shows when all those spare have been used . So if it's showing bad blocks there are lot of problems it's time for a new drive you don't know how many more there are not found yet but have corrupted files. The disk may work for ages or die tomorrow there is no way of knowing. 500 gig ssd are only £50 or less and speed up the system so ask father Xmas for a new drive

Those values are very high. It is very appropriate for the software to recommend replacement. I would have replaced the drive 2 years ago at the latest. I would have cared little for why the values were that high, how this occurred, or how long they had been that way.

My perspective is different than many members of this forum. I remember the 1980's when you could pay 1000$ US for a 10 MB (yes 10 MB) drive. Then it might have made sense to use a drive such errors. With current drive prices it does not.

realflow100 said:

i have 2 HDD's which have what one says C8 sectors reallocated and another says 268

they have stayed at that for over 2 years ... should I be worried? or just ignore it?

Those are high values. Yes, you should be worried, and no you shouldn't ignore it.

However, as they have remained unchanged for two years you could risk continuing to use them - provided you have regular backups against the inevitable day of reckoning.

You don't say if these are your system drives with your Windows installed there, or separate external/internal drives. If they are not the system drive then I'd replace them. After all, a backup of such a drive is a copy of the drive and you might as well just use the copy.

If it's a system drive, then I have had two that had reallocated sectors. One was steadily increasing, so before it became unusable I took an image and restored it to a replacement SSD.

The other has had just the one reallocated sector for more than two years. That one has also clocked up more than 25,780 power on hours according to it's SMART data.

Three years powered up and in active use is more than should reasonably be expected of an HDD. Just to see how much longer it can last I continue to use it - BUT I make a system image of it twice a week!

RolandJS said:

... I think it is possible to back up corrupt files as well as good files?

There's usually a grey area between a good sector and a failing sector where multiple retries will eventually get the good data.

Macrium has an option to ignore bad sectors when imaging. When I made a system image of my failing HDD I did not use that option, rather I took several attempts to make the image until I got one that imaged the whole system with no read errors reported. It was very slow to make the image (multiple retries for the failing sectors) but when done I could be confident that all the sectors in the image were read successfully and that the image was sound.

By the time I had finished the reallocated sector count had grown dramatically, so I was only just in time to save the system before irretrievable loss occurred.

I cant backup as I can't afford another HDD right now and i would have buy and use an external 2TB USB powered drive to store my data onto and that would be too expensive for me right now.
They do not contain an operating system
my operating system is on an 256GB SSD





I have even done many complete disk defragmenter sessions over these years and nothing seems corrupted and the raw values havent changed either
check disk comes up with no results. clean even when i scan for bad sectors.