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?