How concerning are these SMART stats and what course of action should I take?

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saldu

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Dec 2, 2012
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http://i.imgur.com/IbiEsPC.jpg [1]
6 year old Seagate 500 GB drive.
Reallocated sector count has been at 2 since about 2 months, current pending sector count & uncorrectable sector count went from 0 to 2 this week.

Of course, I have everything important backupped, but this is my system drive and I'm not sure how to make a smooth transition to a new drive and new OS (windows 7 or 8, not sure yet).
 
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popatim
The drive is just beginning to show a problem and should be watched but being 6 yrs old already I would get a new one on order.
You have 4 sectors that have failed so far; 2 which the data was recovered and moved to spare sectors and 2 which the data wasnt able to be recovered. Pending is the number of sectors that the drive has marked as needing to be retested in case you didnt know already.

In my experience if the drive doesnt all out fail quickly then it will get a dozen or so bad sectors and then be fine for a long while and then many sectors will begin to fail.

For now, you are ok espicially if money is tight and you are good with keeping important files backed up. But - The sooner you get a replacement drive the better chances...
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popatim

popatim

Titan
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Dec 2, 2009
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The drive is just beginning to show a problem and should be watched but being 6 yrs old already I would get a new one on order.
You have 4 sectors that have failed so far; 2 which the data was recovered and moved to spare sectors and 2 which the data wasnt able to be recovered. Pending is the number of sectors that the drive has marked as needing to be retested in case you didnt know already.

In my experience if the drive doesnt all out fail quickly then it will get a dozen or so bad sectors and then be fine for a long while and then many sectors will begin to fail.

For now, you are ok espicially if money is tight and you are good with keeping important files backed up. But - The sooner you get a replacement drive the better chances of having a successful clone (saving you from reinstalling everything).
 
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saldu

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Dec 2, 2012
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Thanks for the detailed answer, much appreciated and probably the best and easiest to understand description about these stats I've seen so far.
I had severe problems booting up today, it took almost 10 minutes and the HDD activity during it was very weird, for the most part, it would just do a very short read, like 100ms long and then pause for a few seconds.
After it finally booted up, the SMART now looks like this:
http://imgur.com/8K2kEgA
...this is now a problem, right?
Is this still something to clone, and if so, would you happen to have a recommendation about the best way of cloning it? I'd really like to save the money for a new windows license, if possible, but maybe it's too late?




 
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fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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IMHO the Reported Uncorrectable Error count is now a cause for concern.

ISTM that the best DIY option would be to clone your drive with a tool that understands how to work around bad sectors (eg ddrescue). However, you would improve your chances immensely if you could disable retries and reallocation. To this end you would need to connect to the drive's serial diagnostic port.

See http://malthus.zapto.org/viewtopic.php?t=557
 
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saldu

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Dec 2, 2012
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Weirdly, after that one 10 minute boot the boot time became normal again.
The SMART stats remain unchanged to the last pic so far.
Once my new HDD arrives tomorrow, should I first try cloning it with CloneZilla and see if the new one boots before I take any further steps?
Also, since the boot became normal again, I'm concerned my PSU might be at fault, too, but the voltages in BIOS are all within -+5%.



 
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