Hello, I’ve had my WD Essentials 3.5" 1.5TB portable HDD for nearly three years now and for the past few months, I’ve been getting some sings of unstability, errors when writing to the disk, chkdsk reporting bad sectors and so on. Furthermore, C5 current pending sector count has risen between the two checks, few months apar to 209 and offline uncorrectable count was 196, yet reallocated sector count was 0 which I understood means that the sectors reported to be corrupted by C5 should be remapped and then C5 goes down and reallocated sector count goes up, right? But that wasn’t the case here…
Finally, I got the notorious blinking LED problem and was unable to access the drive through USB and got multiple Windows freezes. I’ve managed to get access to the disk by taking it from the case and hooking it up straight through the SATA cable. Though I still had a freeze once, I’ve managed to successfully copy most of the data to other drives (save for few files which were reported to be in a bad sectors by chkdsk, were beyond repairs and made the windows explorer panic when trying to copy them).
After that, after reading some forums, I’ve tried to zero-write the disk with WD Lifeguard Diagnostics, it took couple of hours but after that my SMART attributes are following:
05 Reallocated sectorcount - 0
C4 Reallocated event count - 0
C5 Current pending sector - 0
C6 Offline uncorrectable - 199
So 05 and C4 unchanged, C5 dropped down massively from 209 and C6 went up by 3 sectors.
What is your advice about this disk? I’ve already ordered a replacement 2.5" 1TB, but was wondering how dangerous for the data would be using this drive? I thought that if the C5 went down without 05 or C4 going up, then the ones given by C5 had been falsely reported… What is your take on that?
All SMART data from HDD Tune Pro 5.00 which gives hdd health status as OK (previously warning because of the pending sector count)
Cheers,
Tom
