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I have a year old WD20EADS 2TB drive and the current pending sector count was going up.

When I first noticed it using HD Tune Pro, it was at 15 and over the course of a month it steadily went up to 19. I've read somewhere that Zero-Filling the drive fixes it.

So I backed up the data to another drive and used HD Tune Pro to format and zero fill it. It appears to be fixed since the count reset back to 0 and the health is green again.

Though I'm not sure how reliable that is... Should I worry or should I just continue using that drive? How likely is this an indication of imminent failure?

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Do Not continue using the drive until you are sure that it is healthy. The longer you use a failing drive the worse and more unreliable it becomes.

There are a variety of bootable disk utilities to test the health of Hard Drives. One simple but effective tool to use is Drive Fitness Test. This will tool will essentially go through the drive checking for bad sectors as well as performing a number of other checks in the process.

If DFT reports that the drive is failing (diagnostics in red box) you should check to see if the drive is still under warranty and file an RMA claim with Western Digital to get it replaced. If it does not report any problems (green ok) then you don't need to worry for the time being about the health of the drive and should be able to use it as you normally would.

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  • I did end up doing the Drive Fitness Test and everything was ok... for a few days. I started seeing the current sector pending rising again up to around 12. Then it jumped up several hundred to ~500 a few days later. I started getting write errors and relocated sector counts as well. I ended up RMAing it. I think zero-filling the drive accelerated the death.
    – Jack
    Nov 20, 2011 at 9:06

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