Wait wait wait, which means its FAILING?
'current pending sector count'. Explanation:
Attribute ID: 197 (0xC5) Hard drives, supporting this attribute Samsung, Seagate, IBM (Hitachi), Fujitsu, Maxtor, Western Digital Description Current Pending Sector Count S.M.A.R.T. parameter is a critical parameter and indicates the current count of unstable sectors (waiting for remapping). The...
kb.acronis.com
Assuming it's a hard drive that's failing and not an SSD:
A hard drive's platter (where data is stored)is divided into sectors. Sometimes, a sector becomes not properly readable, and ideally it gets flagged for replacement from the drive's internal reserve cache of sectors, reserved for exactly this kind of scenario. The absolutely most ideal scenario that then occurs is that the drive manages to recover data from the dodgy sector, copies the data to a reserve sector, then the bad sector is marked as unusable and the computer carries on going without the user being any the wiser. I don't often encounter that most ideal scenario though, usually some symptom (like Windows failing to start, or long delays where there ought not to be delays) becomes noticeable to the user.
I don't have anywhere near as much experience with SSDs failing (I've seen two fail) as I do hard drives (I'd guess I've seen at least 200), so I wouldn't speak with confidence about what to expect. One SSD I saw that started to fail was only noticeable because I looked in the Windows event logs and there were lots of drive errors; the other one worked fine except any time it tried to write data to the SSD, Windows would boot then would act a bit squirrelly. From what I gather, most people with experience expect a sudden and complete death from an SSD.
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