Hello, I have a few questions on my main HDD's health. After running Crystal Disk Info, it comes up with a caution on the "Reallocated Sectors Count". It goes "Current: 100, Worst: 100, Threshold: 36, Raw Value: 000000000001." I was wondering if this is a sure sign my HDD will fail? If so, about how long? Is there any way possible to fix it? I would rather NOT go out and buy a new 500 GB HDD right now or anytime in the near future really. This one is 4 Years old. All the rest of my scans report good health, so I was wondering what are my options and what can I do? Also, might this be a cause of some of my programs and games crashing unexpectedly?

Attached is a Screenshot of the Health Check.

One Reallocated Sector after 17461 (= 0x4435) power-on hours is nothing to worry about, IMHO. Just keep an eye on the attribute in case it begins to increase.

There are a few Command Timeouts (0x22 = 34) and a few Seek Errors (0x7A = 122), so they may be responsible for the occasional pause or stutter.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I really appreciate it. I am looking into building a new PC a little later this year so I was debating weather I should plunk down the extra for a new HDD. But if this one is OK, then I will put it off a bit. Again, really appreciate it.

Based on my experience with similar Seagate drives, I would be concerned. I've seen some flaky Seagate drives with similar SMART data. However as long as you have up-to-date & verified backups of your data, then when a drive fails it is less of a disaster, and hopefully only an inconvenience. As always, YMMV.

I realise that recent drives aren't anywhere near as reliable as older models, but FWIW I'm currently using a 40GB Seagate drive that has 50 or so bad sectors, and some years ago I retired a 13GB Seagate drive after it gradually developed 130 bad sectors over a period of a year or so.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Agreed about older drives often deteriorating more "gently". My earlier comments were based on my recent experience with the same Seagate model as the OP, and not related to the bad/reallocated sector count at all. It's the non-zero Command Timeout counter which is the big clue of an underlying problem, in my experience with these drives.