I recently booted up my PC and saw a "Fixing (D:) Stage 1" message that lasted a few minutes. After that, I ran a scan with DiskGenius and found 4 bad sectors on my 1TB hard drive. The drive is making its usual mechanical sounds, and I know what bad noises sound like because I've had a bad second-hand HDD before. I mainly use this HDD for documents, pictures, and videos, and have a few rarely-used Adobe apps on it. I'm concerned about how urgent this issue is and thinking about transferring everything to a new SSD. How long can I expect the HDD to last, and is moving my data the right move?
3 Answers
It's really tough to predict. Sometimes a drive with bad sectors can run fine for months, while other times it might fail unexpectedly. The safest bet is to have multiple backups of your data, just in case.
Update: I rescanned, and it showed no bad sectors. Did I freak out for nothing?
If it's been four years without major issues, keep monitoring it. My 500 GB has a reallocated sector but has been fine for over eight years. Just check your S.M.A.R.T. data regularly with a program like CrystalDiskInfo to catch any rise in errors.
Bad sectors can grow over time, but you could still use the HDD for now. Just remember to avoid keeping anything critical on it without a backup.
I used chkdsk too, and it found problems but no bad sectors. Should I still be concerned? If so, how urgent is this? I've had this HDD for four years without trouble, just the occasional scare like this.