Hello! I have a WD20EARS drive. Recently i was copy pasting some files from my drive and some of them were outputing an error that it can’t be read. So i backed up my files and did an “Extended Test” with Western Digital Data Diagnostics. After some minutes it stoped outputing the error “Too many bad sectors” . After that i also run HDTune surface scan and the output was 4% bad sectors. So i concluded the drive was bad and it was time for an RMA. Before sending the drive back though i wanted to do a “full wipe” so my files are unrecoverable whatsover. So i used KillDisk which basically writes zero and random data to the drive. After doing that though i read that writing zeros to the drive might reallocate the bad sectors and eventually fix the disk.
So after writing zeros i did again a surface test with WD Data Diagnostis and HDTune and miraculosly both came clean!
So i am a little buffed right now on what’s going on. Running CrystalDiskInfo it says caution and from what i understand it has to do with “Current Pending Sector Count” .HD Sentinel has health 52% and says this
"There are 65526 weak sectors found on the disk surface. They may be remapped any time in the later use of the disk.
At this point, warranty replacement of the disk is not yet possible, only if the health drops further.
It is recommended to examine the log of the disk regularly. All new problems found will be logged there.
It is recommended to continuously monitor the hard disk status."
Bottom line, is this disk broken and i should send it for RMA or not?
Below are the screenshots from Victoria and CrystalDiskInfo.
