Is it safe to use this 2TB HDD for like 2 weeks (until I get a 4TB one)?

[blackviking03]

So I found this 2TB HDD in my Old PC and scanned it with Hard Disk Sentinel and it says it has 16% Health, is it safe to use it for downloading & playing games for a limited time (2 weeks) until i get a 4TB one?

 

I plan to transfer all the data from this one (if it's safe to use it) to the new one which I'll get in like 2 weeks.

 

[seban]

2 minutes ago, blackviking03 said:

So I found this 2TB HDD in my Old PC and scanned it with Hard Disk Sentinel and it says it has 16% Health, is it safe to use it for downloading & playing games for a limited time (2 weeks) until i get a 4TB one?

 

I think so yeah.. just don't store valuable files on that thing

[blackviking03]

1 minute ago, 1ppOverheat said:

I think so yeah.. just don't store valuable files on that thing

I just plan to download my entire steam library on it & play it (around 1TB of storage) and then transfer the steam library to the new 4TB one when I get it.

[Moonzy]

if it's just steam games, then you dont have much to lose, other than potentially some game saves if steam cloud doesnt save it

[Chris Pratt]

The only thing that's ever not "safe" storing on a hard drive is data you can't replace. It's not like it's going to catch fire or something and burn your house down. Depending on how bad of shape it's in, you might have issues in game if data gets written to a bad sector, but nothing worse than that.

 

However, when you get a new drive, I would recommend redownloading your library rather than coping it over. If there are any corrupted files, you'll end up with the same corrupted files on the new drive.

[blackviking03]

Ok thank you all.

[blackviking03]

*UPDATE, 30.3.2021.*

Unfortunately, after downloading like 3-5 games on it (around 150 GB) the hard drive just freezes if I try to install something else on it.

 

I guess It's going to die sooner than I thought.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Do you have a way (like a utility) to see where on the disk surface the bad sectors are?  (I think HDTune will do it - older free versions support up to 2TB drives AFAIK.)

If they're concentrated in a specific area of the disk, would it be possible to make a partition (or two) that uses areas that are still semi-good, avoiding the bad areas?  (The actual partition creation may need to be done with a Linux tool like GParted, I don't remember if Windows DIsk Management supports creating partitions with an offset or not.)

If they're scattered all over the place, though .... then yeah, that wouldn't be an option.... in which case if I was in that situation, I'd probably either forego much gaming (I have other things I can do), or choose a few lightweight games that are more important to me and just play those, to tide me over until I get the new drive,