CrystalDiskInfo found "uncorrectable sector count" 978, says "Caution"

So these last few months my hard drive has been making some weird noise from time to time and it's been taking a little more time to load certain folders. It's a sound I've heard before, but I feel like it's been getting more frequent these days. For reference, I have a 3 TB Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 (which, from what I've just read, is infamous for its failure rate, but I've had it since 2011/2012 so I guess it's a miracle it's lasted this long).

I decided to try crystaldiskinfo out of curiosity, just to check my disk health. What I found was "caution" current pending sector count 978 and uncorrectable sector count 978. 978 seems to be the "raw value" and it sounds insanely high. I'm not exactly sure how to read this and what this means, but I take it it's not good. Should I back up all my data asap? Is this drive's failure imminent? Is there any way to approximately estimate how long it's got and how severe this issue is?

1 comments

Once you found out it was a ST3000DM001, you should have backed up immediately. 978 bad sectors has almost certainly exceeded the reserve sectors and would be eating into your files, which would absolutely account for the long time necessary to load folders.

With something like this though, you'd have trouble backing everything up via Windows — try something like ddrescue on a Linux live CD to account for the read errors. Failing that, you could see if a nearby repair shop has either RapidSpar data recovery hardware, or a PC-3000 which would make recovery of the majority of your content trival, and more affordable than full blown data recovery labs.