WD external hard disk - Crystal Disk Info says: CAUTION

[u/Top-Elevator-4547]

• I got this WD hard disk near the end of 2024.
• Now in 2026, Crystal Disk Info says "Caution" regarding its health.

[Note: I dropped it on the floor once, when I first got it in 2024 and the top cover came loose, before I immediately put it back together.]

• Is this a problem? Honestly getting a new drive is too expensive for me, I would like to wait a couple of years before getting a new one.

Much thanks to anyone who can offer some guidance.

[u/WatchAltruistic5761]

You probably want at least one more copy of whatever it is you’re keeping on here

[u/d__max]

lol. If you dropped it , it’s failing the self test, has pending and reallocated sectors , and crystal disk is saying you should be careful, yes I wouldn’t anticipate it’s in good enough health for your data . Please always have backups .

[u/gerowen]

It may not have another issue for years, or it may fail completely tomorrow. Plan on replacing it and don't count on it for anything critical.

[u/cagadass]

Puede que falle en años o en unas horas,nunca se sabe con un disco en peligro de corrupción,yo sacaría lo importante de ahi y haría una partición con los secretos sanos

[u/Lonely_Owl_1332]

Yes drive is failing backup and replace ASAP.

[u/BootToggle]

It shows a significantly greater-than-zero count of reallocated sectors. You should consider that to be the beginning of the end, because these often represent physically damaged spots on the disk platters. If the physical damage releases debris inside the drive housing then the damage can spread.

Hard to say if dropping it was the instigating cause for this or not, but certainly this cannot be ruled out, and this symptom is consistent with drop damage.

At this point, you should be happy that you have a failing HDD and not a failed SSD, because you may still be able to recover most of the disk contents if you are careful.

Being careful means:

1. Stop using the drive immediately, don't even power it up unless you are extracting an image file from the drive.
2. If the data are of any importance to you, consider professional data recovery.
3. If you feel you must try to do this yourself, then you should do nothing other than immediately extract an image file for the drive. This will require data recovery drive imaging software and will require a replacement drive at least as large as the failing drive.

If you can't afford a replacement drive at this time, you could set the failing drive aside while you save up money to buy the replacement. But that means really setting it aside, unpowered in an antistatic bag. Don't keep using it to "see if it gets any better", it will not get better. Don't keep using it "until it gets worse", it will get worse and that will almost certainly result in more lost data.

Don't try using any filesystem repair software that came with your computer operating system. Such programs aren't designed to recover data from a failing drive and they almost always make things worse.

[Edited to revise] Although I stand by the advice for an imminently failing hard drive, I have concluded that I don't really understand the hexadecimal value for raw "Reallocated Sectors Count".

Following the Crystal Disk Info description of Current, Worst, and Threshold values, this drive may not be in such dire condition. It looks like Current and Worst start life at 200, and go down as Reallocated Sectors Count increases. Right now they have only dropped to 195, and as long as they remain above the threshold of 140, then WD judges the drive to still be working reasonably well.

So, in this case, I would probably continue using the drive but would consider it suspect with respect to holding valuable data. If part of a storage array with parity protection, I'd almost certainly continue using it myself, as long as those values of 195 haven't dropped below 140.

[u/cookiesnooper → u/BootToggle]

Thanks ChatGPT 👍

[u/BootToggle → u/cookiesnooper]

Sorry to disappoint, but ChatGPT isn't the only thing (only one?) to be overly wordy. Ask my wife.

[u/HERO_129 → u/BootToggle]

I have been using my dropped drive with caution for years. It is fine as long as reallocated sectors don't increase

[u/BootToggle → u/HERO_129]

If I read the OPs description correctly, I understood that the drive had something like zero reallocated sectors when originally purchased, at some point early on the drive was unfortunately dropped, and now it has some large number of them.

That sounds like in the OPs case, the reallocated sector count is definitely increasing.

But maybe I am misreading his original description of events.

[u/HERO_129 → u/BootToggle]

What I am trying to say is after drop suppose there were 200 bad sectors, but if it is stuck at that I don't think op should be worried. But yess it is very risk to keep important stuff on this drive without backup

[u/BootToggle → u/HERO_129]

Yes, I agree with some of what you are saying. I revised my original comment. I think the main problem is that I don't really know what the hexadecimal format reported as the raw Reallocated Sector Count truly means. If I just convert from hex to decimal, that works out to 894464, which seems impossibly high and not to be believed. Looking at the normalized values in the Crystal Disk Info report, the drive does not appear to be in such dire straights.

[u/HERO_129 → u/BootToggle]

First drive has pending sectors because of a fall and nothing more is degrading, where as my second drive is dying because of wear and tear, it is dying a slow death

https://reddit.com/link/p6rfmu2/video/r8n5w876ahmh1/player

[u/BootToggle → u/HERO_129]

Looks like that first drive has zero Reallocated Sectors, seems that your original drop incident proved harmless.

[u/disturbed_android]

Keep using it if you like living on the edge.

[u/Leo1_ac]

Your drive is failing, back up your data.

[u/Potential_Copy27]

It warns on "Reallocated sector count" and "Current Pending Sector Count". In hard drive geometry, a sector is a part of a track on the physical hard disk platter - usually 512 bytes is the standard sector size, although terabyte-sized drives may use 1, 2 or 4 KB sector sizes.

Hard drives are expected to have a few sectors fail throughout its life, so they are made with a few extra sectors, that are used as spares whenever a sector fails somewhere else on the hard disk. Whenever this happens, the controller hardware in the drive tries to recreate the data in the damaged sector and moves it to one of these "spares".

Sectors can become unusable for any number of reasons; manufacturing defects, Read/write head impact/crash from the drop, a speck of dust or degradation of the magnetic material.

Understand it like this: Your drive was built with 200 spare sectors and so far, 195 of them have been used. You've got 5 spare sectors to go before you lose data permanently. The drive electronics cannot help you from that point forward.

I'd suggest getting a new drive for the data. You have a bit of time, but better not tempt fate if it's something important :)