Failing Hard Drive

[patrickaupperle]

Well, I just ordered a new HD. I did so because the number of bad sectors increased by 10 and I got another error.

Read Error Rate
Frequency of errors while reading raw data from the disk. A non-zero value indicates a problem with either the disk surface or read/write heads.

Under the Assessment column for this category it says:

Failing

Then under the Value column there is:

Normalized: 50
Worst: 50
Threshold: 62
Value: 768612578

I think this means that it is basically dead. Thank you all and please correct me if I am wrong.

[patrickaupperle]

The read error rate came back down . How does this happen? What does it mean? Also, it says that my HD "has many bad sectors", instead of what it said for a while ("Hard Drive Failure imminent" or someting like that.) What does all this mean?

[WolfRage]

It means the tool is doing it's job. As stated before manufacturing tools can be sort of magical when it comes to repair. SO overall the outlook for the drive has improved, continue with the low level format and hope for the best. But you should also know that this could be a mirage.
I mean that the tool could be either repairing the sectors or masking the bad sectors by rewriteing the flow of the drive around the bad sectors. Thus less bad sectors are detected after each repair, but at the same time the drive is lossing capacity as more sectors are written out of the flow.