Few months ago I started noticing that some of my drives were behaving not really as they should, for instance when I created a new folder inside them, the explorer won’t show it up till I refreshed the drive. I thought though this was a bug from Windows 10, although, after having now checked with CrystalDisk, I’m starting to think it’s actually one of the HD Drives failing.
As you can see here, the load/unload cycle count (C1) for my drive shows it has done it more than 2.8M times, which compared to other older drives I have, none of each reaches 100.000 yet (and they have many more years, in fact the unit failing is the most recent one I purchased, which is even weird).
I’ve also noticed it has 1 reassigned sector and some pending and uncorrectable sectors, but these numbers aren’t too high nor has increased on the past weeks, however, I think there’s something really bad with this unit in terms of load/unload cycle.
Seeing these numbers, should I consider asking for an RMA of this disk? I read in other posts that the lifetime of an HDD is around 300.000 cycles, I’m currently on 2.800.000+ cycles, which makes me think the HDD is about to die anytime…
Sorry, that was my bad, I had the perception it was newer, but it is actually from 2016 (January). Still, it’s the newest one from all the disks I have (4 installed, 2 not always installed) and no other WD drive shown numbers like these for load/unload cycles.
WD Data Lifeguard doesn’t shows any issue with it, passes the S.M.A.R.T test, I need to run the extended test though. I’ll post the results here once I’ve got them.
I’ve run the WD diagnostics software as well (quick & extended tests) and the results were:
It passed the S.M.A.R.T test (quick)
In the extended tests said it had some wrong sectors that could be repaired (which I didn’t did, since I have data on it and I prefer to not run this).
In the SMART information it doesn’t shows RAW values so I can’t compare load/unload cycles… however it appears with a green check (and I’m not so sure 2.8M cycles means “green”, I’d say no).
In any case, I’m not specially worried about the wrong sector, it’s just 1 and is not increasing as I said before. I guess this drive won’t be in warranty (although the issue I’m facing doesn’t seems to be caused by me…) so I believe my only solution here is to buy a new drive and copy everything ASAP.
You’d know far more about it than I, but I’ve always been cautioned to not interpret RAW values as the real deal. Some manufacturers normalize the numbers to give a different calculation, and only the mfg would know how that’s done.
