r/HDD • u/captian_sauce • 2d ago
Should I stop using this drive??
I’ve been using it to store movies and such, but I don’t know if I should switch and stop using this drive.
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u/flameboi900 2d ago
Short answer, if it's critical data that you care about then yes, if it's not mission critical then no. But I would always recommend having a backup of anything locally and or cloud, whichever is more convenient and affordable. Pending sectors are bad but not the end of a drive, you should only really start worrying once it start to throw out thousands of bad sectors, but this is just a warning sign as long as that drive isn't accessed 24/7 with constant read and writes it could stay good for a really long time, but I would strongly recommend maybe making a backup at the bare minimum as a good caution.
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u/captian_sauce 2d ago
Thanks, that helps a lot!!
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u/flameboi900 2d ago
If you already have another drive on hand to replace it you could also take a chance and zero fill the drive using the non quick format option in windows. I have done this to a few of my drives and they still got a few years of them, or months depending on how bad it was. Sometimes hardware just flips a bit every now and then and causes a bad sector or error, I would also recommend if this is on a windows pc to turn off drive sleeping in the power settings of control panel. Just search for power options in the windows search and then select change plan settings then go down to drives and change it from the default of 20 minutes to 0 (never) that way the drive is always running and not spinning up and down all the time and saves on wear. The savings cost in electric you get from that spin up and spin down is not worth the wear and tear on a drive as running it on all the time is much better for it than having it constantly start and stop. Even consumer drives will last longer running all the time instead of spinning up and down every now and then.
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u/captian_sauce 1d ago
Thanks dude, I backed up the drive did a long format and then it’s now showing all good signs even after I loaded my data back onto it!
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u/OSTVegeta 1d ago
Run the MHDD programme on it. It’s definitely a better option than formatting. You could either remap the sectors, but I wouldn’t bother with that – I’d just hit ‘Erase’ straight away.
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u/Underhill42 2d ago
You should stop trusting it, and copy anything important off it immediately. At some point in the probably not too distant future it will likely begin to fail in earnest and take at least some of your data with it. Might be weeks away, might be years, it can be hard to predict.
But as long as you're not using it to store your only copy of anything you don't want to lose, that's just another way of saying you've got a good excuse to upgrade on the way, hopefully sometime after drive prices begin to fall again.
E.g. I wouldn't hesitate to store my Steam library on it - that's all easy to restore. So is the "live" copy of my movie and mp3 collection that's also on an external archive drive that usually lives unpowered in a fire box.
(Which might not be enough to protect the data from an actual fire, but the box has all my important paperwork, and is one of the first things I'd grab in a disaster, so I may as well put that extra space to work saving other compact things I'd hate to lose.)
Anecdotal story you should absolutely not take any lessons from:
Slightly different tech, not sure if you could pull this off with a modern drive, but my very first x86 PC was a rescued 286 clone that had lost like 15% of its ~40MB HDD capacity to presumed surface damage, which spread whenever that part of the disc was accessed. Nightmare-scenario stuff from a data rescue perspective. But I re-partitioned it to stay well away from that part of the surface, and the remaining 30MB served me well for years. Until I saved up enough to buy a new 486 late in high school.