I honestly would get a new HDD. I had so many HDDs die on me that now I keep triple backups of important stuff (like photos etc)
And code I keep in bitbucket anyway.

I'd also say to not get too paranoid about SMART test results. However, if you're in warranty, I'd start a chat with tech support on the drive to see if it's a replaceable error.

I've recently replaced an ageing Samsung drive that was giving multiple smart warnings (no failures, but chkdsk was being called by windows quite a lot and recovering damaged files) with a Caviar Black, which I'm very happy with. Also, it helps to use the manufacturer's diagnostic tools to see if there's a warranty replacement issue (generally, they'll make you do this anyway before RMA).

Nowadays hard disks tend to have 4096 byte sectors. Reallocated just means the drive has replaced a bad sector from its pool of spares. Remapping is often triggered by a write to a 'bad' location, since the drive does not need to be concerned about what used to be there anymore anyway. While it's not remapped, it's still bad. Sometimes data from a bad sector can still be read with enough retries and some tricks. Rewriting the same data can then trigger the drive to remap the sector, effectively fixing it. There are tools for this sort of thing.

I seem to recall that Google published a survey in 2007 that found that about half of the disks that actually broke gave some indications through SMART beforehand, and about half of disks giving such indications actually failed. So while it may give insight over whats going on inside the disk, it could be less useful than one might think.

A nice little Free App for recovering files is TestDisk.

Lol people, stop telling him to backup his data or get a new hdd XD

Ah right, I'm still used to the old disks with XP lol (and my external are 512e)
By the way, are native 4k really so common, I think that Win7 isn't even able to boot from them.

^its almost as if they dont read my bloody posts to begin with ;p


i dont need to back up my data all my data is on different drives ( and backed up via blu rays )

the 500 gig hd WAS my OS drive was being key word

currently i switched to an 40 gig ssd\160 gig hd combo

I'm under the impression that they are common, but report a 'logical' 512 byte sector size for compatibility. There should just be a noticeable performance penalty if handled sub-optimally by the operating system. (Small or unaligned writes will require a read-modify-write cycle instead of just write)

The drives that I bought earlier this year say this:
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes