I was out of town over the weekend and my unRaid server starting sending me all kinds of errors about re-allocated sector counts and pending sectors.  They seem to have stopped now, but that doesn't mean they won't start again.  I've attached my diagnostic information in case something stands out to anyone.  My assumption is I need to have this drive replaced as soon as possible, but since my assumptions are many times wrong, I thought I might ask here for a more informed opinion.    

tower-diagnostics-20170710-1047.zip

You're assumption is correct.

Thanks.  I have another drive that got reallocated sectors up to 166, but then it stopped and it has gone years without more reallocated sectors and it has worked fine.  The reallocated sectors on this drive are now up to 101.  If it stops reallocating sectors like the other drive is it likely ok for continued use or are reallocated sectors by themselves a warning that the drive needs to be immediately replaced?  I'm trying to understand what data I should be looking at regarding the drive to know when it definitively needs to be replaced (short of it failing entirely of course).  

Some reallocated sectors can be OK, if it's not too many and it stabilizes, pending sectors on the other hand = read failure, so impossible to rebuild another disk if it fails, and there are a lot of them:

 

197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   196   196   000    Old_age   Always       -       1389

 

Thanks.  I think I understand.  I have a new drive arriving today.  I'll pre-clear it and then put it in place of this one.

 

Something else though has me thinking.  Should I just throw away this old drive in lieu of the pending sectors or should I possibly try to pre-clear it, see if it passes, and then put it back in the array?  I guess I'm wondering whether pending sectors are ever something that can be resolved or is it a clear message that the drive is simply end of life.

If the pending sectors go to zero you *may* be able to use, but with so many I wouldn't trust it to nothing of importance.

1 minute ago, johnnie.black said:

If the pending sectors go to zero you *may* be able to use, but with so many I wouldn't trust it to nothing of importance.

 

Thanks!  Probably not a risk I should take.  To the "trash" it goes.

Sometimes with a new drive, funny things can happen and the pending sectors can go away and reallocated attributes can stabilize.

 

But once a drive has ~1000 hours on it, it is not common that these types of problems stabilize. Like @johnnie.black says, even if the attributes clear, there is high likelihood it is going to pop up again.