Is my external HDD dying?

[Charlie98]

I have 2 Seagate GoFlex 500GB portable HDDs I use in rotation to back my system up. Oddly enough, one is a 5400RPM drive, the other is a 7200RPM... although I thought I was buying identical drives, but I digress...

The oldest one, which has about 13000 hours on it, threw up a caution in CrystalDisk... warning about Reallocated Sectors. I've tried to research this... I understand what a reallocated sector is and the pending problem with it, what I don't understand is the information Crystal Disk is giving me...

What the heck is that saying and is my beloved portable fixing to take a puke?

 

[Charles Kozierok]

In short, yes.

Every drive has spare sectors that are reserved. If the drive is having trouble with a "regular" sector, it is marked as bad, the data moved to one of the spares, and a note made in a table to tell the drive where to find that data. That's a reallocated sector.

All drives will have a few of these, but if the number is increasing over time, the drive is on borrowed time, IMO.

 

[Ketchup]

Might want to see if SeaTools will find any problems. Are you running NTFS or FAT on the drive? Could be a problem with the file system, and not necessarily the drive. But it should be cause for some concern either way.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Wouldn't hurt to scan the filesystem, but logical structure errors shouldn't cause SMART alerts.

 

[C1]

Jeeeezus, why F around. The drive is displaying issues and it has a lot of hours on it (and reliability is rated as MTBF). Just replace the thing with a nice boxed unit from NE that has a significant use review sample size and a 5 star rating.