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If I see pending or reallocated sectors climbing, I immediately purchase a new hard drive and move this drive to non-critical functions or use it for testing in other machines I own. Personally I consider a drive with pending or reallocated sectors as a drive no longer fit for production and my uses. Really depends on how much you value your data and how well you can handle downtime in the event of a disk failure. Should I Replace My Hard Drive If It Has Pending Sectors? As long as this number is fairly low and does not increase drastically, your hard drive may continue to function as normal. Pending sectors turn to reallocated sectors, which re-map the data to spare sectors on the disk. While a few pending sectors may not be anything to worry about if they stay at roughly the same number, or are transferred to reallocated sectors and do not drastically increase. You can learn more on the post I did about the reallocated sector count warning. Pending sectors are the precursor to reallocated sectors which can be a strong indicator of a dead hard drive on the horizon.
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This is a critical S.M.A.R.T parameter and if the count increases it may indicate that a drive failure is imminent. How Important Is A Current Pending Sector Count Warning? Once a sector is reallocated the Current Pending Sector Count will decrease, and the Reallocated Sectors Count will increase. If the drive attempts to read the data on the impacted sectors again unsuccessfully, these sectors will be reallocated to spare drive space. If these sectors are later read successfully the count will decrease. What does Current Pending Sector Count mean?Ĭurrent Pending Sector Count is a S.M.A.R.T parameter that shows the current count of unstable sectors on your disk that are waiting to be remapped. CrystalDiskInfo showing a caution warning for you drive and highlighting ID C5 Current Pending Sector Count? Here’s what you need to know about this S.M.A.R.T attribute:
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