I bought this HD only 6 months ago and a few days ago I heard a weird noise coming from the PC (it’s like something touching a fan, not the “click click” of bad heads). I don’t know if it came from the HD because it was only for a few seconds and I couldn’t verify the position of the noise, but I wanted to make sure that the HD was ok and did an extended test with HDTune, getting 0 allocated sectors, 6 pending sectors and 4 uncorrectable offline sectors. I don’t know if, before the weird sound, it already had them (maybe it came from factory with them?). BTW, I have checked the fans of the PC and they have nothing near that could touch them and produce the sound.
Yesterday, it made the same weird sound again, so today, I have used WD Data Lifeguard, its extended test, and I got the “too many wrong sectors” error. After that, I have checked the SMART… and the pending sectors are now 27!!!
Is this a sign of a failing drive? Maybe HDTune didn’t find those wrong sectors, but they were already there? Should/Can I make use of the warranty (I bought it on January)?
I’d like to make a backup of everything and make a slow format on the HD, for seeing if it allocates the bad sectors but I haven’t a spare HD for doing that.
