REALLOCATED SECTOR COUNT 4948. Request for advice

Question

I felt need of testing because some of my stored games were failing to boot properly. Quick test from HD Tune Pro app displayed 3 red blocks in one of the test runs and a full test always reports 3 Red blocks of bad sectors.

Hence:

1. How bad is it in a count from 1-10 (Score of 1 being worst and 10 being Flawless)
2. I am currently using it as external expansion drive for games for my xbox. To extend whatever life possible should i better use it for storing 4K UHD BluRay Rips that i stream with plex. Basically i want to know out of these two usage scenarios what puts the least stress on the drive and potentially buys me some time.

Answer 1

4948 reallocated sectors would be plenty reason for me to replace the drive. As you can read others may have different opinions. Which kind of shows the difficulty in answering this type of questions, it's mostly a matter of opinion, or experience perhaps, but there are no rules carved in stone that tell us to replace a drive if number of reallocated sectors reaches [insert number or percentage here].

I assert that many people asking about an x number of reallocated sectors are seeking reassurance. And so fact that this number is non zero in itself causes an uneasy feeling. The simplest answer I think is simply replacing the drive if you want peace of mind.

Any drive can fail at any point without warning. In addition to that, I think there's evidence that supports the statement that any drive with non zero reallocated sectors has a higher chance of failing 'soon' than one with zero reallocations (and pending reallocation sectors), for example: https://research.google/pubs/failure-trends-in-a-large-disk-drive-population/.

OTOH one might argue, with > 1000 sectors to spare, why worry about 100 reallocated sectors? Or with 10000 to spare, why worry about 4948 reallocated sectors? While the question sounds reasonable, I personally think it's a bad idea to wait until the number of reallocated sectors reaches the point where it causes the normalized value to reach the threshold as set by the manufacturer.

Another point that can be made, is to observe if whatever number of reallocated sectors we have is static or increasing. I agree one could argue that if the number is static there's less reason for concern compared to the situation where we see the number steadily increase. I once had a drive that got rejected by a RAID controller due to two recorded reallocations, I have used the drive for years without the number ever changing. Still, IMO there's a difference between 2 or 4948 reallocations.

One may argue we can try to see number of reallocations in relation to other attributes. Now this may be less straight forward than it may seem. While reallocated sectors is pretty standard across manufacturers, many other attributes are not. So one may interpret reallocations as 'soft' errors based on values of other attributes, in reality a drive reallocating a sector means the sector is physically unusable. The drive will reallocate once it has determined a sector is no longer safe to use. So either drive determines it can not write to the sector or it can not reliably read back what it just wrote. A soft error that is recoverable can be resolved by writing recover data back to the exact same sector. Reallocation by definition means the drive deemed it a hard error.

Answer 2

I'd say most modern drives have some bad sectors and its a 'pre failure' issue. You probably need to/want to look at your pending reallocation count, and any number other than zero there is a bad thing.

That does appear to be an older drive, and external drives tend to sometimes not be as robust.

Its also worth remembering/deciding if the data can be recovered easily. On one hand, should the drive die, you can re-download your xbox games. On the other hand, your 4K UHD BluRay Rips could be reripped if you have the disks and video playback tends to have error correction built in.

Game files are large, constant reads. Video tends to be bursty, probably needs a lower data rate, and you're likely to put less running hours into the drive. If you're using this more for transient than long term storage and with data you don't care about the integrity of - I'd just wipe the drive when it gives trouble, reformat it again, and run it till the next time it gave trouble.

Answer 3

On the count from 1-10 : I would give your disk a badness level of 9 (where 10 is extremely bad and 0 is perfect health).

This number means that 4948 sectors died on you, but the disk firmware has managed to relocate/remap them to spare sectors. This number is very large and shows a disk that I wouldn't trust in the long term.

The reason I don't give it 10 is that the evaluation of the disk's firmware of this parameter was 77, while the failure threshold was 36. This means that the disk has more than 10000 spare sectors. In addition, the "Uncorrectable Error Count" is zero, so you had had no sectors with hard failure.

You may continue to use the disk, just ensure you have backups for the important files. Keep an eye on the two parameters of "Reallocated Sector Count" and "Uncorrectable Error Count". If either one starts climbing up, then the disk's state is degrading.