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  • Lately I've noticed my HDD getting louder.
  • SMART data tells me that there are 10 uncorrectable sectors(had those for quite a long time) and pending sectors (this number keeps changing, going from 3 to 10k+).
  • Then I ran into some corrupted files. They were movies that I downloaded and watched within the past 3 months. I tried to delete them and some wouldn't delete because corrupted. I quickly backed up everything and it seems like only some of the recently downloaded stuff got affected because it wouldn't copy. Old files are fine with 2 exceptions.
  • Then my pc started freezing for a few seconds at a time and I noticed no spikes in ram or cpu usage.
  • Running chkdsk /r right now and it's not looking good.

So my question is, is there any possibility at all that a bad ram could cause this? I used windows memory diagnostics which came back clean, but I've heard of bad ram corrupting files before so I wanted to make sure. I figured that it would only be an issue with writing data though but my movies played just fine so I strongly suspect it's the hdd.

Thanks in advance!

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    I don't think that RAM could be the problem, since all the warning signs come from the hard drive. As there's the chance that the drive will stop working at any moment, you should start to backup your data and be ready to replace the drive
    – spike_66
    May 12, 2020 at 4:57

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As a general rule, if my hard drive is making any abnormal noise I'd assume it's about to fail. You're lucky that it hasn't died suddenly and left you with no way of recovering it.

  • Try to make sure the system doesn't turn off.
  • Make a copy of your data somewhere else as soon as you can.
  • Replace the HDD and destroy the old one to protect your data and avoid the temptation to use it again.

If you aren't in the habit of making backups, now is a good time to start!

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So my question is, is there any possibility at all that a bad ram could cause this?

No. Bad RAM would propagate into the content of disc sectors once RAM is written onto disc but would not affect the readibility of sectors.

Thanks to your good description of pointing out that the number of pending sectors is increasing from 3 to 10k you are faced with the problem of a dying drive that you have to replace. Your symptom description of corrupted files and a hanging PC in connection with the increasing pending sectors even support that diagnosis.

Replace the drive to eliminate this source of error.

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