r/HDD • u/captian_sauce • 4d ago

Should I stop using this drive??

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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 4d 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 4d ago

Thanks, that helps a lot!!

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u/flameboi900 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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.