Whats the significance of reallocated sector count warning?

[quicky008]

Recently while playing a video on my pc,i was experiencing really jittery performance and the player was freezing up every few seconds-i thought that something might be wrong with the hdd and so i checked it using HDtune pro-on running it i received a warning that the reallocated sector count of my HDD was rather high and it said my drive has "damaged sectors"-does anyone know what this really means?Is it an early indicator that my hdd is not in a good state and might fail soon?Will it be safe to continue using it?Its a 1 tb seagate hdd and i have lots of crucial data on it-should i consider replacing it as soon as possible?Please help.

Here's a screenshot of hdtune:

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[topgear]

In layman's term - when you HDD can't read/Write to a sector it moves that sector to a reserved / spare space so your OS does not write / read to / from these bad sectors. If the reallocated sectors keep on increasing you need to RMA the HDD.

 

[quicky008]

^Thanks for your inputs-the hdd has become almost non-functional and it causes my system to hang whenever i try to access any of its partitions-i think its totally busted now,what started as a relatively commonplace bad sector issue has now developed into full blown hdd failure.As its out of warranty I wont be able to rma it either.Before the hdd went totally kaput,i managed to recover around 60% of my data from it but couldn't retrieve the rest even after repeated attempts.I think i will just have to throw it away now or use it as a paper weight.What makes it all the more frustrating is that its only about 3 and a half yrs old and i didn't expect it to start malfunctioning so soon-it seems Seagate's HDDs are not reliable at all.I lost a lot of important data because of this.

 

[topgear]

I agree that quality has been dropped. Previously HDD manufactures used to offer 5 years warranty but all that changed on 2011. Because of flood in Thailand the HDD manufacturers had trouble with manufacturing but at the same time they also sensed the huge demand for HDDs on market so they reduced the warranty to only a year then and stayed on the same path for a long time even after their manufacturing unit became normal. They also hiked price instead of brand new replacement they began to offer Recertified HDDs as RMA units.

Anyway, take backup of important data regularly .. better if you can keep those on a USB PD.

 

[DK_WD]

Hi [MENTION=33037]quicky008[/MENTION],

So first thing's first, please backup your existing data in other storage space. After backup the drive, try to run the manufacturer utility in the system to test the HDD condition regularly.

Just a suggestion, try to install the Auto backup software for virtual storage in your System. With that, the data will store in virtual space and easy to recover any time.