"Warning" status in HDD S.M.A.R.T. test disappeared

marudese

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Jan 19, 2011
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Hi to everybody!
I have a Samsung 1.5 GB hard drive (HD154UI).
I had it inside my computer as a secondary hard drive, not for windows, just extra data, and when I ran a few smart tests from different software I found that it was in "Warning" health, because it had 3 "Pending unstable sectors". I contacted Samsung for RMA, and they sent me all the necessary modules to send it.
Before sending it to them I ran a Zero Fill overwrite from HDTune Pro, and now after 16 hours of writing, it completed.
Now if you check the S.M.A.R.T. status it says OK, the pending sectors are gone, and there is no reallocated sector.

Is the hard drive still damaged or is it magically better now? Should I still send it to Samsung?


These are the screenshots before the ZeroFill:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8075278/old1.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8075278/old2.png


These are the screenshots after:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8075278/new1.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8075278/new2.png

Thanks in advance to all!!
 

marudese

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Jan 19, 2011
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18,510
yes I thought of that too but I know that the RMA will make me pay for the service if there is no defect and I send it to them anyways. at least here in Italy it's like this.
 

marudese

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Jan 19, 2011
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Thanks, my question though was: Is the hardware damaged or not? since it can't magically undamage itself, how is it possible that before it was on warning and now it's not?
 
I'd be a little concerned about the Reported Uncorrectable Error count. I don't know how serious it is, though.

I suspect that the pending sectors could have resulted from a bump during the writing process. When the host writes to a pending sector, the drive retests it and returns it to service if good, or replaces it with a spare if confirmed bad.