How close to death is the hard drive

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I ran Crystal Disk Info to look at the SMART information on my external 2 TB drive and it's reporting a "Caution" health status. The specific error is the Current Pending Sector Count, which is 196. I have tried power cycling the drive, and it didn't get fixed. Should I be worried yet? Is this a situation where I should immediately buy another hard drive and back everything up or is there a way to fix it?

Best Answer

Quoting from SecurityNow! podcast number 81:

STEVE: The problem is, and in fact the reason that we’ve always used the slogan “SMART is dumb” at GRC, is we see dead drives all the time where the SMART system says, oh, everything’s fine.

LEO: It’s all working, no problem.

STEVE: Exactly. The drive can die spontaneously while SMART is completely happy and sees nothing going wrong. At the same time there are drives which look like they’re on their last throes from a standpoint of the SMART data that just keep on going for years.

Long story short, you cannot rely on SMART data in any meaningful way. If you want to play it safe, back up your data, if you want to be really safe, back up and get a new drive.

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