I have a WD20EARS-00S8B1 for just under a year and recently it has started showing some odd behavior. I ran chkdsk /r on the drive and 3/4 of the way through chkdsk it said it replaced bad clusters in file *.* After chkdsk completed I located the file referred to in chkdsk and it turned out to be a rar archive. I opened the rar and tried to extract the contents and winrar threw up a crc fail warning on the archive.
At this point I decided to load up crystaldiskinfo, and the drive in question was highlighted as caution. Current pending sectors was at 8 and uncorrectable sector count was at 5 however reallocated sector was 0. I backed up the contents of the drive to another system and booted up dlgdiag and did an extended test. After many hours the utility completed, reported errors and wanted to perform a repair operation and completed with code 0223. I went back into windows 7 and crystaldiskinfo reported the drive as good and both pending and uncorrectable was 0, however reallocated sectors was still a zero value as well.
I proceeded to long format the drive and copy the contents back to the drive. Several hours later I came back to smart again reporting both pending and uncorrectable sectors values of 3 each, as well as a new value of 5 under write error rate.
So again back to dlgdiag. This time I zero wrote the drive which said it successfully completed, but on the extended test it again said errors were found and if I wanted to repair and again 0223 code. I booted up to windows and the write error rate was back down to zero, and uncorrectable sectors is also zero, but now I have 1 pending sector again. Reallocated sectors count still reports a value of zero.
How does one proceed in this kind of situation? A file stored on the drive actually ended up being damaged but dlgdiag just seems to mark these sectors in question back to good status only to show up again in pending/uncorrectable sectors only a few hours later. I would be happy if the drive would reallocate these sectors, but going by smart status it is not doing that.
Can the drive be RMA’d under this situation? If I let the drive idle for a few days both pending and uncorrectable sectors slowly climbs back up again. So far every extended test I’ve run to date completes with error code 0223.
Thanks!