Hi guys,

I have a problem with my Portable 5TB HDD, CrystalDiskInfo says: "Health Status: Caution, C5 Current Pending Sector Count - Raw Values: 000000000031".

This Portable 5TB HDD is never moved and is always stationary, it has NEVER been dropped and I 'handle it with care' so to say, I've had it for around 13 months.

10 days ago I restored an Image with Acronis, and I made a mistake: I forgot to take out/un-plug my Portable 5TB HDD during the 'restore Image' process, so I am 99% sure this is the cause for this problem.
Since then I copied 3 videos on the Portable 5TB HDD, I noticed the problem when I watched 1 of the videos - it had 10-15 sec freezes hmm, so I thought something is wrong, I tried to copy the 3 videos from the Portable 5TB HDD to my Internal SSD and 2 of the videos copied OK, but 1 video could NOT copy and said 'cyclic redundancy check error' or something similar, and then I opened CrystalDiskInfo.

My initial thinking is to backup everything from my Portable 5TB HDD, and then make a full format, and after that I don't know if this Portable 5TB HDD will be reliable to use any more.
I have some new data on it that I like to save.

So I wanted to ask you guys for advice.
1. Did I do physical damage to my Portable 5TB HDD, by leaving it plugged-in while I restored an Image with Acronis?
2. What is the best course of action to do now from this point onward?
3. Will this Portable 5TB HDD be reliable to use again? Or I should buy a new one?

This problem arose either when you saved these videos to the hard drive or while the drive was automatically optimizing storage space for the new video files. Either the hard drive failed to write the data correctly, the writing process was interrupted, or the drive already had damage in the specific area where the data was written.

If you need to copy files that won't copy due to a data error, use Unstoppable Copier or NonStopCopy.

1: These hard drives automatically unload their heads less than a second after the computer stops accessing the drive, so no, that couldn't have damaged it. Admittedly, these are SMR drives that perform maintenance tasks during idle periods, but in any case, you would have needed to impact the drive while it was actively processing data to cause damage.

2: Continue using the hard drive but avoid storing important data on it - or at least try to prevent a situation where essential data exists in only a single copy located on that drive. You could completely wipe the drive to eliminate the errors, though that doesn't guarantee they won't return. It depends on what caused the errors. If the hard drive simply failed to write the data, the errors won't reappear; however, if the drive is already damaged, the damage could spread and eventually lead to failure. Alternatively, if the damage is minor, the drive will automatically replace the corrupted sectors with spare ones and continue to operate without issues. Until the hard drive decides that the bad sectors need to be remapped, it will continue to corrupt data.

3: If you can afford to buy a new hard drive, then do so. Choose a model - or a retailer - that offers long-term warranty coverage (ideally three years or more), given how frequently you use the drive. There is no guarantee it will actually be replaced under warranty if it fails, but considering your current drive started having issues after just a year, it is better to have that protection.

Often times, a small number of pending errors is due to some fluke event rather than something actually wrong with the platter media. You can always write zeroes, then re-test and see what happens. You can also write zeros only to the blocks being reported instead of the whole drive.

ora, runner978 - Thanks guys, I appreciate it.

I will try to backup everything from my Portable 5TB HDD first, then I will try to write zeros only to the bad sectors.

I have Victoria 5.37 but have never done this before, because I never had such problem till now.
How do I find out which sectors are bad?
And then, How to mark/write zeroes only to the bad sectors, so they are NOT used/partitioned again?


Before I backup everything (there is 3TB currently on it, mostly videos), I wanted to ask:
If I delete the last 3 videos (including the 1 corrupted video) from my Portable 5TB HDD, do you think CrystalDiskInfo will say: "Health Status: Good", and the C5 Current Pending Sector Count will drop to 0?

If I delete the last 3 videos from my Portable 5TB HDD, will that increase the chances for my backup to fail, or it won't make much difference?

No, SMART's purpose is to record degregation.

Writing 0's will cause the drive is reallocate the bad sectors it finds during the write process. In plain speak - writing data forces reallocation (the process of marking the sector as "bad" and subbing another in it's place) if a bad sector is found - it does not fix it - and SMART's job is to keep a count of how many of these reallocation events occurred. The more you have, the worse your drive.

In my opinion I would replace your drive as sector reallocation on any SMR drive is a good sign it's failing.

The hard drive will hide bad sectors automatically. If you try to erase them, the hard drive will remove those sectors from the list of sectors pending relocation if the write is successful.

Run a full surface scan. Error lines and bad sector numbers will appear at the bottom of the window. Wait for the scan to complete. The same window allows you to select the start and end sectors; they should be set within a few thousand relative to the bad sector number. Below that is a block size selection; select 1. Below that is a section with radio buttons for Ignore-Erase-Remap-Restore. Select "Erase" instead of "Ignore" and start the scan. You'll have to do this for each sector. And there are already at least 50 of them.

If you try to erase a sector, you'll be in for a surprise: Windows won't let you write anything to the hard drive while it has an active file system.

In general, this is a very bad idea, and you should only do this after the data has already been copied, otherwise you can erase data in other files in addition to the problematic one, which you will not know about after erasing, but will only find out when these files open in the corresponding programs with errors.

Absolutely not. Deleting a file doesn't erase it, it simply creates a record in the file system indicating that the file no longer exists, should be forgotten, and the space it occupied can be used, nothing more. If deleting a file actually erased it, deleting it would take the same amount of time as writing the file.

But you can do what you want, but you'll need to fill the file with random data and then delete it, i.e., use a shredder. I can't recommend a good program for this; usually, this feature is available in antivirus programs under the name "secure file deletion." This trick worked perfectly on hard drives without SMR, which wrote data to the same place they read it from. SMR drives work differently; they try to write data to a location that can be written at high speed, so it's possible that a bad sector won't be overwritten.

The two videos that played without problems don't need to be deleted. You should only delete the one that froze and caused data errors. If the bad sectors are only located where this video was recorded, the backup will complete without errors.

I don't know what program you're using to back up your files, but you can use 7-zip to determine which other files, besides the video, are damaged due to bad sectors. Select all the files on your hard drive and run a checksum calculation. The bottom of the status window will list the files for which the checksum calculation failed due to read errors.

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The best thing you can do now is simply delete the damaged video and continue using the hard drive. If the bad sectors were caused by anything other than a hard drive failure, then as new data is written, the number of sectors pending relocation will drop to 0. If the hard drive is damaged, data errors will reappear after some time, or the hard drive will replace the bad sectors, as mentioned above. However, crystaldiskinfo will now constantly warn you about the number of sectors replaced, which you will no longer be able to fix.