Bad sectors on a WD 1TB Blue drive

[tis_ma_ak]

Hello people,
I'm new to the forum, so please have patience.

Yesterday my ~3.5 y/o WD 1TB Blue drive started to "act up".
I had updated my bios and installed win10 over my old win7 (however not on this drive, but on a seperate ssd).

After I had installed win10, i reconnected my 1tb drive, formatted it and started to install my programs.
The installation of Visual Studio failed saying that there was a problem installing, after that i noticed that all the files on the drive (i moved Desktop, Videos, Pictures etc. from the ssd to the drive) were still there, but could not be read (zip files were not "valid", exes could not be run).

I restarted the pc, and went into bios to see if i had overseen some settings, where - to my surprise - the drive was not even listed in the sata configuration tab, so i restarted again, checked the bios settings (all perfect, drive recognized, ahci set, ...) and booted into win10. I went on to install a bunch of other programs (origin, steam, battlefield 4) without a problem. However, as soon as i started up battlefield 4 to play a round, my drive would act up again, as i described above (plus the disk usage of that drive would go up to 100%).

So i downloaded the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows and checked the drive, SMART data was good, quick test returned no errors, extended test however was cancelled after 10-20minutes with the message "Too many bad sectors".
So from my knowledge that means that the drive is faulty?
Is there a way to determine whether these are logical or physical bad sectors?
And is there a way to still use this drive (only as a file storage, as i already ordered a sshd for programs)?
And lastly, can bad sectors be caused by formatting a drive (prior to that i had no problems)?

I also started a test with badblocks (with the options -vsn) on linux, however after ~1.5 hours (15-20% done) with apparently no errors I canceled the test.

Thanks so much for looking in to this!

Attachments

Error message from Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows (note: the second drive in the list is an old wd drive, no problems with this one, the third one is the bad one)

[helpless]

If there is important data, back it up and try full erase (or whatever it is called) in WD diagnostic tool. If it is finished successfully, you may try extended test again.

...can bad sectors be caused by formatting a drive (prior to that i had no problems)?

No.

[michael chiklis]

can bad sectors be caused by formatting a drive (prior to that i had no problems)?

No, unless your power supply has some issue, or power supply connector on your drive wasn't plugged in a stable manner or if the connector got damaged/loose.
All these case mentioned above could have damaged your drive surface due to lower platter speed and/or improper head writing caused by bad power.

[tis_ma_ak]

Thank you for your responses.
I was able to complete the Full Erase with the WD tool and am running an extended test right now. So far there were no problems, the test is running smoothly (before it sometimes froze at some sectors for a couple seconds and disk usage would spike to 100%). I will post again when the test is completed.

Thanks again!

[tis_ma_ak]

The extended test ran through without any errors, here is the result:

Test Option: WRITE ZEROS
Model Number: WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0
Unit Serial Number: WD-WCC3F0100211
Firmware Number: 01.01A01
Capacity: 1000.20 GB
SMART Status: PASS
Test Result: COMPLETE
Test Time: 15:38:39, September 29, 2016

Test Option: EXTENDED TEST
Model Number: WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0
Unit Serial Number: WD-WCC3F0100211
Firmware Number: 01.01A01
Capacity: 1000.20 GB
SMART Status: PASS
Test Result: PASS
Test Time: 17:32:38, September 29, 2016

SMART Data:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskInfo 7.0.3 (C) 2008-2016 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

OS : Windows 10 [10.0 Build 14393] (x64)
Date : 2016/09/29 17:37:32

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(3) WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0
Firmware : 01.01A01
Serial Number : WD-WCC3F0100211
Disk Size : 1000,2 GB (8,4/137,4/1000,2/1000,2)
Buffer Size : Unknown
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 1953525168
Rotation Rate : 7200 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ACS-2
Minor Version : ACS-3 Revision 3b
Transfer Mode : SATA/600 | SATA/600
Power On Hours : 5837 hours
Power On Count : 2332 count
Temperature : 32 C (89 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., 48bit LBA, NCQ
APM Level : ----
AAM Level : ----
Drive Letter :

-- S.M.A.R.T. --------------------------------------------------------------
ID Cur Wor Thr RawValues(6) Attribute Name
01 200 200 _51 000000000000 Read Error Rate
03 177 172 _21 00000000084D Spin-Up Time
04 _96 _96 __0 000000001099 Start/Stop Count
05 200 200 140 000000000000 Reallocated Sectors Count
07 200 200 __0 000000000000 Seek Error Rate
09 _93 _93 __0 0000000016CD Power-On Hours
0A 100 100 __0 000000000000 Spin Retry Count
0B 100 100 __0 000000000000 Recalibration Retries
0C _98 _98 __0 00000000091C Power Cycle Count
C0 200 200 __0 000000000032 Power-off Retract Count
C1 199 199 __0 000000001066 Load/Unload Cycle Count
C2 111 107 __0 000000000020 Temperature
C4 200 200 __0 000000000000 Reallocation Event Count
C5 200 200 __0 000000000000 Current Pending Sector Count
C6 100 253 __0 000000000000 Uncorrectable Sector Count
C7 200 200 __0 000000000000 UltraDMA CRC Error Count
C8 100 253 __0 000000000000 Write Error Rate

To me it seems that the issue is resolved now? Is it safe to use this drive now?
It is actually possible that the e-sata cable was not connected properly when i formatted it, though i am not sure about that. I dont think my psu is faulty, because i never had problems with my other two drives or any other device.

[tis_ma_ak]

So i posted before but it still needs approvement by mods, not sure why it takes so long, but i wanted to give a quick update whatsoever. Sorry if this is duplicated then:

I ran the extended test through without any errors, installed a bunch of programs without problems, so for me the problem seems to be fixed, maybe it was caused by some software error.

@Spildit Thanks for the link, on first view this seems to be really in-depth, so i'm not sure if i will do all that right now, but if the drive starts to act up again I will.

Thanks for your help!