WD20EARS Current Pending Sector

I formatted this drive, lets call it drive 1, under windows xp at first. I also used western digital align tool and wdidle3. I use drive 1, purely for storage of media files where other computers can access it from my LAN network.

After using a third party defragmenter tool, MyDefrag v4.31, to defrag the entire disk, windows boots up with the dskchk saying it needs to fix drive 1. I let it go through and found it deleted some of my files. Just in case, I ran hdtune pro v4.60 to check the SMART data. At first, it showed a warning and highlited the Current Pending Sector section showing value of 4. I didn’t really know what it was and found various answers on forums. I left drive 1 alone for the next few weeks barely accessing it. I couldn’t defrag it, even with the windows defrag, it said it couldn’t run on drive 1. As well, the current pending sector rose to around 300.

I built a new PC and bought a couple more harddrives and figured now would be the time to move as much files as I can so that I can reformat drive1 under windows 7 to see if that works. After reformatting the drive the current pending sector rose to 65534. There were no errors reported from chkdsk or western digitals own utility. I ran benchmarks on read and write using hdtune pro v4.60 and there are major dips in performance accross various areas of the drive.

Should I replace the drive, and can it be replaced if its under warranty?

and dlg diagnostics didn’t report any bad sectors?  cause that would be strange.  if you’re not comfortable with the drive, after running it through the diagnostics tool, especially the extended test, then I’d get it replaced.

I ran dlg diagnostics in extended, I think the mistake I made was only running quick test. This time, It says there are sectors that are repairable. I clicked the repair button and now the number of sectors has been reduced to 100. It’s sounds a lot better than over 60000. After benchmarking with HdTune, level of performance was back to normal, was getting only minimum 55 MB/s read, before with the errors, it dropped to as low as 5 MB/s. The benchmarks were done with an empty drive. I ran it a couple more times just to be sure.

I’m still concerned about it showing as a warning even though the dlg diagnostics said it repaired the bad sectors. Should I be worried?

like I said, if you’re not comfortable with the drive, get it replaced.  a few bad sectors I wouldn’t worry about.  but when there start to be a lot of bad sectors, even a hundred, I’d probably replace it.

Thanks for reply.