fixing SMART Current_Pending_Sector count

linux

I have a western digital 2.0TB Black hard drive that was returning a SMART error of "9 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors". This probably means the drive is on it's way out, but it was passing long smart tests ok, and it's in a raid so I've decided to try and fix it. I've read that writing to the drive can force the hard drive to reallocate those sectors, so I gave it a try with the dd command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc

Before and after smart data:

# before
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       9

# after
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

And then I've partitioned the drive and have been using it without issues now for a few weeks. Time will tell if this ends up working I suppose.


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