High number of pending sectors in new Western Digital WD20EARX

[Oorja]

My friend gave me this drive saying that his disk utility status shows several warnings about the health of this disk. So he gave it to me to perform the tests. Well he didn’t noticed strange behavior during normal daily use. Now there is no data on the disk and it is really easy to make test on it and moreover this disk has a year of full warranty. If there are some read/write errors, I should not worry because offline scan can probably remap them but how do I get to know about huge number of Current Pending Sectors. I used the HD Tune for full write-read session but nothing changed there.

[Mathrubootham]

I really don’t know what is happening with your drive but I can assume that it is no good. If the sectors get remapped, then you should see its traces in reallocated sectors/event count. What do you get? I think that you must be getting zero. The pending sectors are keep pending. I would rather RMA that drive.

[Purujeet]

These are the sectors that the disk has pending reassignment because it found that they are wrong. You have a very high value. You have to control it and see if they rise. Watch that the number does not go up (in fact over time will shift from C5 to 05, reallocated sectors, which is what "normal" once they occur these and re-enter the same sector). Anyway it would be interesting to have safe place for valuable data, especially if you see data that rises rapidly in a short time. If you can, switch port and cable disk, format it, fill it, pass a scandisk, and if after the above sectors have 0 pending, the disk is fine. It has happened several times until I found the sata port facing problems.

[Ramanujan]

In my case from the SMART counters there are 32 sectors in hopes of receiving a write request for remapped to spare sectors scattered across the hard drive. It is therefore useless to waste time passing a surface scan that lasts for hours, because these sectors are handled by the firmware of the hard disk being unnoticeable for the operating system.

For now, let it be, that some hard drives have spare sectors.

[Elijah*Blue]

Your current account pending the sector is higher than the industry redistribution account.

This means that areas failing can no longer be replaced by the software disk.

Disk fails - make sure you have supports, and get a replacement.

[little-Jacqueline]

I do not know very much about what might be technically wrong with a hard drive (other than obvious things like broken plates, runs aground by car or crashed heads), but I would guess What program you used to 0 fills the hard drive has probably eliminated markers. The controller in the control areas had written to mark the bad ones as unusable. If you are not adverse to paying for it I would recommend using SpinRite in order to get better status as just what SMART reports.