#Should I still use my 5TB WDElements portable HDD that said it had 37 bad sectors but now none/good?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

lapis topaz
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Should I still use my 5TB WD Elements portable HDD that said it had 37 bad sectors but now says it's good and has none?

Earlier this week I formatted/securely erased the drive 5 times with 1 pass with CCleaner, 1 pass with diskpart-clean all, and 3 passes' with Eraser (US Department of Defense DoD 5220.22-M [E] / first pass – with zeroes, second pass – with ones and the last pass – with random data). I also installed Hard Disk Sentinel Pro and it says "The hard disk status is PERFECT. Problematic or weak sectors were not found and there are no spin up or data transfer errors." but HDS was installed after the drive was formatted so it has no memory of the drive having any bad sectors if that matters. Another thing is WD isn't accepting the RMA code for the 2 year warranty for a drive that is less than a year old so I could still try and return it to Amazon but there might be issues with doing that. Right now I'm not sure if I should trust continuing to use this drive or not.

Do you think the drive is still good based on the images or should I go ahead and disassemble/trash it?

JointPics_20230204_162540.jpg JointPics_20230204_162845.png
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@main geode @digital sphinx You two helped me find the formatting software last week so I started a new thread for this question.

digital sphinx
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Use it for data you have backed up elsewhere or don’t mind losing (eg Steam downloads). Keep an eye on it over time.

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Really, you should have a backup regardless of drive health. Backblaze offers unlimited backup space for $6/month

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You never actually had “bad” sectors, they were just pending. Once they were revisited by your wipe, it appears they’ve corrected yourself and didn’t need to be reallocated. Odds are the drive is fine :)

lapis topaz