WD external HD revived... Will it be usable again?

My trusthy worthy WD external HDD, which I purchased in the 2007 I believe (my book home edition) suddendly died a while ago, I used it on both my macs and it was windows fat 32 formated: Basically any of the mac could see it, so I could not do anything.
Loading it from windows XP I could format it back and analyze it, and it resulted with lots of BAD SECTORS, at this point I likely tryed a low level format, and I could see it again, yet after some use, it would crash.

With my G73 arrival, I tryed to check it again:
Scanned it with HD tune, and the bad sectors where still here, so I did a low level format again, and after than I full formatted it to NTFS FS,
now no more Bad Sectors are displayed, but I get this WARNING health status:





Would it be still safe to use this hard drive, or shall I just go and replace it?
ARe there other test to run to check it's healt?

 

Back up the data to another place and RMA it ASAP to WD.

 

3 years warranty gone right after the deadly crash (pissed of that)
Either way I replace the HDD myself or I buy a new one
Any idea of how can I do it?

 

That drive is dying -- it's only a matter of time. Why don't you just buy a new one? The prices have gone down a lot since 2007.

 

I have such warning on 4 of my 5 harddrives and they've been there forever

Unless it turns into "Failure", you should not pay too much attention to a "Warning"! Modern drives seem to have those almost out of the factory. I'm not saying this is right and it is all of them, but my brand new laptop came with 2 warnings, my netbook had 2 warnings after 3 weeks of usage and I have 2 other external drives with warnings - been using them like that for a few years now!

Just pay attention to those numbers - if they escalate, that could be a sign there is something getting worse. otherwise - don't worry, be happy!

Here a screenshot from the external I have attached at the moment - been like that for nearly an year now - never had any problem with it, but the numbers are quite low and not changing:

 

It really depends. A few is one thing, but the 250 he has listed is quite a lot.

 

that's what I was thinking myself too...
I really feel like it is going down...

Well I can either buy a brand new one or try to fix it, since It may not be hard... I liked the idea of do it myself...
Anyway I may check the price and just buy another one.

 

If it bothers you - buy a new one. 1TB 3.5 external WD costs about 60 euros.

But I would just observe the numbers - if they don't increase, I wouldn't worry about it that much.

 

Meh, you are playing Russian Roulette by using a drive like that. As Althernai said, external hard drive prices have plummted from 3 years ago. I paid 100 bucks for my 250GB Seagate Freeagent 3.5" desktop external. 100 bucks can buy you 2 TB these days lol.

 

Buy your external hard drives from Costco in the future.

If anything like this goes wrong again, you can return it and get a refund for your original purchase price. Even if the drive is 3+ years old. It's pretty sick.

 

Which is great thinking... until it suddenly dies again and you lose all your data. SMART values like that are admittedly not a guarantee of failure, but the fact that this drive has already died once (and crashed multiple times) along with said SMART values means that the drive is pretty iffy at this point. I'm not saying you can't use it, but it's definitely not something I'd depend on.

 

agreed, ordered a seagate expansion with 500 gb, since I am not using any other connection than the usb2 it will do well, thanks guys!

 

Just checked my external WD 1TB and was unpleasantly surprised



Tried the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Utility and it cannot repair the damaged sectors. I guess they are too many.

Had to generate an RMA / Advance Replacement and will see what happens next.

The drive has been barely used and is less than 2 years old. Not satisfied....

 

Your actual reallocated sector count is only 3, which is not bad, but the 174 pending is definitely worrisome. Note that these are only sectors that are considered "unstable". If the drive can perform a successful write to them, they'll be removed from the pending count. Of course, if the drive cannot successfully write to them, they'll be moved from pending to reallocated. I don't know if I would have started a RMA just yet myself, but I can understand if you'd rather be safe than sorry.

 

Well, if they didn't offer the Advance Replacement I wouldn't probably create an RMA just yet because I don't have where to backup the 1TB drive. I hope that everything will go smooth so I'll receive the new drive and copy the contents of the old drive before shipping it to WD.

As for the bad sectors, I've heard the drive producing continuous read/write/parking head sounds when it's supposed to be idle. Maybe just trying automatically to reallocate the bad sectors.

Also the eSATA interface was never fully functional. At times the drive would just freeze while copying files or installing something. Happened with all my 3 laptops.

We'll see what they are going to send me since the production of my model has been discontinued....