SMART Current Pending Sector Count Error Fix?

[KangUsapEmenq]

Lately, I've got power outages in some times (it can be 2-3 times a day) that, unfortunately, my laptop powers down, either, as I'm lazy enough to replace it yet.

Today, I just discovered my HDD SMART suddenly (or, it's on there and I never actually realized it) reporting 64 of Current Pending Sector Count.

Spoiler

This 1 TB drive, running for nearly every single day for 5-12 hours (depends, somehow) because, yeah, it's my daily driver. Now, I'm scared of this, to be honest. I just getting bad past memories of... Losing TWO (yes, two) drives and ALL of it's data because it suddenly dies, and I'm neglecting (well, I'm an idiot on the past) if it preforms badly means it's going to die. Fortunately, mostly on this drive are games, music and movies (and I don't want to lose my collection either). A lot of more important data like personal photos, etc., already moved onto another 1 TB external drive to free up the space on this drive.

 

Now. I already read about this error, and the one good way to fix it is, by actually clone (or in this case, I'd just copy all of those data) the drive to another drive, format the drive, and do the fix using software or anything else that can work. I thought it's kind of time consuming and I actually got a lot to do lately online for college, somehow. And I read some either if this won't be reliably fixing for the future. But, I don't know, that's why I asked here.

 

BUT, on the safe side, should I NOT using this drive yet just for the sake of not losing data in it? And considering getting a new drive (which... I won't really consider because I'm broke already of getting battery for this laptop, and this just arrived yesterday)? I really hate to redownload all of those my collections, somehow. Be better safe than sorry.

 

Is there any kind of alternatives on how can I fix it? Or, at least, prevent it to dead all of the sudden, at least?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Make backups, dirves can fail at any time. 

 

Rewrites will normally help, you can wait and see if it happends to get written over again, or try something like defrag to move it.

 

Id really try to get a ssd aswell, not that much more than. 1tb hdd, much faster, more reliable, lower power, quieter, not affected by drops.

[KangUsapEmenq]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Make backups, dirves can fail at any time. 

 

Rewrites will normally help, you can wait and see if it happends to get written over again, or try something like defrag to move it.

 

Id really try to get a ssd aswell, not that much more than. 1tb hdd, much faster, more reliable, lower power, quieter, not affected by drops.

Well, for the most important ones, I actually already did, except for the lot of games and movies I downloaded. But still I just don't want to lose my digital media here. And I turned on auto-defrag every week.

 

I actually got a SSD for the boot drive. And unfortunately, getting a 1 TB SSD would really turn the vacuum cleaner on my bank account since it's mostly 2x the price still lol

 

Or. Since I have the external ones still on good condition (and really barely used), I could just swap the drive and call it a day? But still I'm afraid if the external one would be fail over time, as my backups are on there.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, dhannemon13 said:

Well, for the most important ones, I actually already did, except for the lot of games and movies I downloaded. But still I just don't want to lose my digital media here. And I turned on auto-defrag every week.

 

I actually got a SSD for the boot drive. And unfortunately, getting a 1 TB SSD would really turn the vacuum cleaner on my bank account since it's mostly 2x the price still lol

 

Or. Since I have the external ones still on good condition (and really barely used), I could just swap the drive and call it a day? But still I'm afraid if the external one would be fail over time, as my backups are on there.

Id just backup to the external drive every few days or so. THen if it does fail you don't have to worry about anything. Just set it to auto backup with something like filehistory in windows or veeam

[Bad5ector]

Backup is the only thing you can do.

 

SMART is just the drive self monitoring system. It has counters that it considers thresholds and if you go over those thresholds it will log it in SMART. Some can be ignored as they are things like how many hours the drive has been operating, and others can be more serious. If you run a HDD diagnostic tool, it should tell you whether or not you have anything seriously wrong.  

 

I would back up important stuff to cloud storage (photos, resumes, any school or work stuff) and then start saving for a new drive. SSDs are nice, but they can also fail suddenly without warning. Only real way to protect your data is through some sort of redundant backup, RAID 1 or 5, etc. Or making a bunch of copies on several different drives to help reduce the chances of one drive failing and taking all your important stuff with it. 

[Bad5ector]

6 minutes ago, dhannemon13 said:

And I turned on auto-defrag every week.

Do not Auto Defrag NTFS, that will put undue stress on your drive for little to no benefit. This isn't Windows 98 and FAT32.

[KangUsapEmenq]

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id just backup to the external drive every few days or so. THen if it does fail you don't have to worry about anything. Just set it to auto backup with something like filehistory in windows or veeam

 

3 minutes ago, Bad5ector said:

Backup is the only thing you can do.

 

SMART is just the drive self monitoring system. It has counters that it considers thresholds and if you go over those thresholds it will log it in SMART. Some can be ignored as they are things like how many hours the drive has been operating, and others can be more serious. If you run a HDD diagnostic tool, it should tell you whether or not you have anything seriously wrong.  

 

I would back up important stuff to cloud storage (photos, resumes, any school or work stuff) and then start saving for a new drive. SSDs are nice, but they can also fail suddenly without warning. Only real way to protect your data is through some sort of redundant backup, RAID 1 or 5, etc. Or making a bunch of copies on several different drives to help reduce the chances of one drive failing and taking all your important stuff with it. 

Simply put, for the safest side, I'd go for change the drive and.. Sell the old one?

 

1 minute ago, Bad5ector said:

Do not Auto Defrag NTFS, that will put undue stress on your drive for little to no benefit. This isn't Windows 98 and FAT32.

Ah, dang. Just turned it off as soon as you said so. So probably this is why my drive is trying to die after 3 years of usage, because for 3 straight years running auto-defrag?

 

Man it kinda hurts to know such thing late lol

[Bad5ector]

@dhannemon13 Don't get me wrong Defrag has it's place still with NTFS, but you shouldn't need to run it weekly. Usually NTFS does a good job at keeping the files contiguous on the disk.

[KangUsapEmenq]

2 minutes ago, Bad5ector said:

@dhannemon13 Don't get me wrong Defrag has it's place still with NTFS, but you shouldn't need to run it weekly. Usually NTFS does a good job at keeping the files contiguous on the disk.

Yeah, should just do it monthly for the future for the safer side, then?

[Bad5ector]

12 minutes ago, dhannemon13 said:

Simply put, for the safest side, I'd go for change the drive and.. Sell the old one?

1 minute ago, dhannemon13 said:

Yeah, should just do it monthly for the future for the safer side, then?

I wouldn't try to sell an HDD that has SMART errors, or is potentially failing. And if I did I would have to severely reduce the asking price to the point that it wouldn't really be worth it. Also, you will want to be upfront about that with the buyer, and most people buy HDDs to store their data, not risk losing it. 

 

Honestly, I would say wait until Windows tells you to defrag, or you notice a drop in performance. Usually NTFS will need to be defraged if you are running very low on space. Otherwise it usually does a good job at keeping things in order. If you were running Defrag because you thought of it as preventative maintenance, that would be a mistake. It is moving files around, which puts wear on the drive. Most likely Weekly defrags aren't actually doing much though, since it probably isn't fragmented much to begin with.  

[KangUsapEmenq]

6 minutes ago, Bad5ector said:

I wouldn't try to sell an HDD that has SMART errors, or is potentially failing. And if I did I would have to severely reduce the asking price to the point that it wouldn't really be worth it. Also, you will want to be upfront about that with the buyer, and most people buy HDDs to store their data, not risk losing it. 

Okay it's a stupid thinking of selling it anyway lol

 

In any way, what tool should I use to at least fix the sector relocation?

[kirashi]

11 minutes ago, dhannemon13 said:

Okay it's a stupid thinking of selling it anyway lol

 

In any way, what tool should I use to at least fix the sector relocation?

HDDs and SSDs usually almost always have a certain number of blocks / cells that aren't visible to the end user. For example, a 500GB SSD might actually be 512GB or 540GB in size, but you, the user, will only ever see 500GB of usable capacity. This allows the firmware of the drive to map dead or dying sectors / blocks / cells to the "spare" ones, preventing complete drive failure as the drive begins to age.

 

So, you don't "fix" sector reallocation - it's actually a good thing that your drive is trying to reallocate sectors as they begin to fail / wear out. The drive is saying "hey bud, I'm starting to wear out, so while these couple sectors dying are fine, eventually you'll need to replace me" long before it dies due to unusable sectors. That being said, as @Electronics Wizardy noted, drives can and do fail without warning sometimes, so best to backup data all the time.

[KangUsapEmenq]

6 minutes ago, kirashi said:

HDDs and SSDs usually almost always have a certain number of blocks / cells that aren't visible to the end user. For example, a 500GB SSD might actually be 512GB or 540GB in size, but you, the user, will only ever see 500GB of usable capacity. This allows the firmware of the drive to map dead or dying sectors / blocks / cells to the "spare" ones, preventing complete drive failure as the drive begins to age.

 

So, you don't "fix" sector reallocation - it's actually a good thing that your drive is trying to reallocate sectors as they begin to fail / wear out. The drive is saying "hey bud, I'm starting to wear out, so while these couple sectors dying are fine, eventually you'll need to replace me" long before it dies due to unusable sectors. That being said, as @Electronics Wizardy noted, drives can and do fail without warning sometimes, so best to backup data all the time.

Welp, I can say agree with this somehow. But... I kind of already running chkdsk /r /f for 20 mins now and I wanna cancel it but.. Probably the best way now I can do is just wait for it, right, instead of forcibly stopping it? 

 

Man I'm being stupid right now

[kirashi]

5 minutes ago, dhannemon13 said:

Welp, I can say agree with this somehow. But... I kind of already running chkdsk /r /f for 20 mins now and I wanna cancel it but.. Probably the best way now I can do is just wait for it, right, instead of forcibly stopping it? 

 

Man I'm being stupid right now

Eh, I mean, I personally wouldn't cancel a chkdsk as it can find other underlying filesystem corruption caused by botched Windows updates, for example, but with Windows 10 systems I've rarely had an issue cancelling it when I've needed to. If you have the time, just let chkdsk run through, then consider your next moves in the event the drive fails in the coming years, months, weeks, or days.

[KangUsapEmenq]

13 minutes ago, kirashi said:

Eh, I mean, I personally wouldn't cancel a chkdsk as it can find other underlying filesystem corruption caused by botched Windows updates, for example, but with Windows 10 systems I've rarely had an issue cancelling it when I've needed to. If you have the time, just let chkdsk run through, then consider your next moves in the event the drive fails in the coming years, months, weeks, or days.

Now it's starting to get really fuzzy: constant 100% sometimes (with basically no R/W) and a lot of freeze. And it's on 432 count right now after I did cancel the chkdsk (and turns out I'd just press X and done). Welp, old laptop getting being an old man now sadly.

 

Probably I'd just consider stop using the drive for a while (or, not, rather to use it carefully not to do writes too much), for the sake of my movies and games, then? Replacing it either when the time goes on?

[kirashi]

5 minutes ago, dhannemon13 said:

Probably I'd just consider stop using the drive for a while (or, not, rather to use it carefully not to do writes too much), for the sake of my movies and games, then? Replacing it either when the time goes on?

Just backup data you cannot easily re-download then replace the drive when it finally kicks the bucket.

[KangUsapEmenq]

Welp. In conclusion and finally the decision, I put the drive on storage (bubble wrapped, and cardboard wrapped either, yes, overkill I know) for a while until I can find the replacement. I've already did lose 900 GB worth of data from 2 drives (and all laying on storage) years ago, and I thought losing 700 GB more of data would be hurt a lot.

 

Fortunately, 30% of my movie collection, and all of the most important data for college (which backed up on Drive daily either) and personal data are on the second external drive so.. I wouldn't get bored so much anyway lol

 

And this is why you'd love using two separate drives on your laptop. At least I can still use it for daily driver.

 

Thanks for everyone for answering. Means a lot still actually.