Is my HD broken? Can i use it for anything?

Question

Someone suggested formatting my HD so I won't try to read bad data. From what I understand the OS marks which clusters are bad and skips them. So after copying all my data I did a quick format to NTFS.

I copied files with an error then I right clicked and tried to create a new folder. I was greeted by this message:

I have 926 of 931GB free. Is my external HD broken?

Answer 1

The drive itself should reallocate bad sectors ... up to a point.

The first thing I would suggest you do is to download the drive manufacturer's diagnostic software and run that against the drive to check its health. If the maker of your external drive does not provide test software, then try using the "generic test" mode of the test software from one of the major hard drive manufacturer's.

(I think Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test can be used even if you don't have a Hitachi drive installed. Not sure about Western Digital or Seagate.)

If the drive fails a test and is still under warranty then try to RMA replace it.

Answer 2

That is an ominous error message. It's good that you've backed everything up onto another disk. How long have you had the drive?

You could download a diagnostic utility from the actual hard drive vendor, or you could get a general diagnostic utility like HDDScan ( http://hddscan.com/ ) and: 1.) look at the S.M.A.R.T. report; 2.) perform the linear verification test and S.M.A.R.T. tests. That will usually tell you whether you should ditch the disk or not, or how long you have until imminent failure.

About a week ago Windows 7 was throwing repeated warnings about my secondary storage disk actually. The day before it happened, I had a few applications freeze while trying to read from that drive, and since the drive is an old 80GB, I figured it was on its last legs once the errors began popping up (every 20-30 minutes about 4-6 times).

After I backed up everything to another drive, I ran HDDScan to see what was wrong, and found that the only value below threshold was the Spin-Up Time attribute; everything else still looked good. Based on this, I decided to keep using the drive as my secondary storage device on a probationary basis with daily backups to a newer drive and frequent commits to our SVN server.

Since that day, I haven't had any problems. Occasionally, it will take 3-4 seconds for the drive to spin-up, but otherwise I haven't had any more warnings or problems working with the drive. But in my case, I was merely getting "warnings" (due to an out of range S.M.A.R.T. value) from Windows, not errors about not being able to perform operations on the drive. And even still, the drive isn't under heavy usage; it's only about 5% full; and everything on it is constantly being backed up to at least 2 other storage locations.