SMART test returns Caution

[NunoLava1998]

Hello!

 

Just for fun, I decided to run a SMART test on C: with CrystalDiskInfo. Actually surprisingly (even though it's a 9.5 year old drive), it's at "Caution".
However, it runs fine for me, I haven't seen any data corruption whatsoever and it's extremely silent and has never done any noises that were off.
Even running CrystalDiskMark is still pretty silent, and that read stuff at 75MB/s and wrote at around 30 MB/s.

 

I'm on Windows 10 64bit.

Some basic specs from this 2-3 year old build are:

 

Motherboard: H81M-S1 (revision 2.1)
CPU: i3-4160
GPU: GTX 950 (was overclocked to pretty much it's limits once, +800MHz is quite a lot for a card that's already "Superclocked!!1", but only did it for like 10 mins)
RAM: 2x8 GB DDR3, I forgot the brand but I'm pretty sure they're different brands each and one's Kingston (I bought one of the RAM sticks some months after the build)
HDD: Western Digital "WD10EAVS-00D7B1", 7200 RPM. I'm surprised about the read and write speeds, after 9-10 years this thing has dropped 20MB/s from best-case read speed (95 to 75) and 15MB/s on best-case write (45 to 30).
This is also from my previous build which was so new it was a Ready for Windows Vista drive, but 6-7 years later it started crashing and freezing up a lot so I built a computer myself.
PSU: No idea, but it was Bronze+ as far as I know and wasn't any major brand, but it works well and hasn't done anything bad on my system or me. Somewhere around 500W.

 

It hasn't crashed or freezed on me yet. According to Western Digital's quick hard drive test, at checkpoint 97 it errors with error 07 and on the extended test it errors (without more info) somewhere around sector 400000-500000 (assuming sector sizes are 4096 bytes, 2GB-2.5GB range, or if it is 8192 bytes, 4GB-5GB range).

 

CrystalDiskInfo results are attached on the bottom.

The current "Current Pending Sector Count", the only one with the Caution light, is at 192 (no idea 192 what, sectors, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, exobytes, etc).

I think this is from a defrag i restarted in the middle of, which caused a lot of my files to become corrupted, but I 2 days ago did a fresh Windows 10 install (deleted all other partitions, i don't need a backup, I just have 2 external storage drivers with stuff I would usually install and my passwords and stuff), however as *far as I know* formatting doesn't really do much other than deleting the filesystem structure, which would still let bad sectors exist.

 

I hope any of you can determine if this is serious or not. 

 

[dionkoffie]

Almost 32K hours lmao.

meh just keep using it until it's broken. back-up your data tho

[NunoLava1998]

4 minutes ago, dionkoffie said:

Almost 32K hours lmao.

meh just keep using it until it's broken. back-up your data tho

I don't have data that's important (except passwords), but I do already have 2 backup drives with important stuff and some app installers and Linux Distros, which I did just in case my machine broke... or just in case I reinstall because it also has installers for some apps i regularly use (and yes, that means Edge is now utterly useless because I don't have to install Chrome from there)

[demonix00]

It's just flagging that there are bad sectors that are waiting to be swapped with sectors that are kept in reserve in case of failure.

 

It isn't serious yet, but it can get really serious to the point where the OS will load and will cease up part way through because of the amount of bad sectors.

 

I would suggest that you make preparations in case it does decide to go bad by just having another new HDD on hand to take over.