Hard Drive failing?

[insane111]

I run Crystaldriveinfo every few months, and this month one of my drives came back with a "Caution" warning. 4 uncorrectable sectors and 4 pending sectors. I have no idea what that means, the only thing I could really come up with through Google is that it *might* mean the drive is failing and that the broken sectors will continue to multiply. Anyways, the main thing I'm wondering, is this alone grounds enough to submit a RMA request to WD? I haven't actually noticed anything wrong with the drive(yet), but there is only about 3 months left until the 3 year warranty is up - so if this a valid excuse to return it that would be great


Here's a piece of the log, I removed everything else that I'm pretty sure is irrelevant:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
WDC WD6400AAKS-22A7B2
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Power On Hours : 15314 hours
Power On Count : 322 count
Temparature : 38 C (100 F)
Health Status : Caution

-- S.M.A.R.T. --------------------------------------------------------------
C5 200 200 __0 000000000004 Current Pending Sector Count
C6 200 200 __0 000000000004 Uncorrectable Sector Count


edit: I spoke too soon when I said I didn't notice anything wrong, when I went to backup everything on the hard drive a couple files failed to copy because of an I/O error.

 

[drescherjm]

I run Crystaldriveinfo every few months, and this month one of my drives came back with a "Caution" warning. 4 uncorrectable sectors and 4 pending sectors.

It means there are 4 sectors that had data on them but the drive is not able to read them. When this happens to me (at work ...) I make a bit for bit copy of the drive using ddrescue (which will rescue as much of the good data off the disk as possible). Then I put the drive through a 4 pass badblocks read/write (overwrites all data on the disk) test to see if the drive is reliable. Remember that if you write to these sectors that are marked pending (by a full format, fill the drive with zeros, run badblocks ,,,) the drive should reallocate new sectors for the bad locations.

badblocks and ddrescue are available on any linux livecd like ubuntu or sysrescuecd.

http://www.sysresccd.org

If you are uncomfortable with linux you can do a full format (hopefully this is not the OS disk) and install the hdtune trial and do a full disk test.

is this alone grounds enough to submit a RMA request to WD?

I believe so. For me if it fails after my badblocks testing or any more sectors become pending during testing I send the drive back.