Weak sectors in Hard disk drive

[Akamai]

Hi, my friend gave me a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green that is 7 years old. I immediately installed it and open Hard disk sentinel and it has 100% health though after downloading for a while it got 150 weak sectors and it's heath dropped to 50%. Should I continue using it? It isn't bad sectors though. I'm currently running surface test (read and repair) while writing this.

[CursedPanther]

The drive should work mostly fine, though I would advice against storing anything important on it without another backup copy.

[OLDMAN🎅]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

The drive should work mostly fine, though I would advice against storing anything important on it without another backup copy.

[Andrius227]

I would only ever use such drive in raid1/raid5. In fact i do have an old wd green 2tb in my synology nas... Thats probably the best way to squeeze out everything from a hard drive. Ignore errors, let it die completely, it may still last years.

[pasa]

What sentinel counts as "weak" sector? There is no such thing in SMART. I suggest you first look at a raw readout of SMART data. If it shows read, write errors, reallocated sectors, that is a good indication to maybe decommission it. My preference is to have all those at zero (just chacked my green that is also ~7 years old, it's all clear with 33k working hours), but a small number might still work.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Make sure to run the SMART test and the Extended surface test with WD DIAG for Windows.

Then if checks out, launch CMD via Run As Admin and run this on that drive...

CHKDSK /F /R

If it's not C drive, first type
D:\
at the prompt to switch drives first.

[Akamai]

I've been using the 1tb Hard drive for a while. Been downloading games and the Health just went from 52% to 99% and a 1 weak sector. What did just happened?