Current Pending Sector S.M.A.R.T. attribute

Question

Today I noticed that in one SATA HD that I'm monitoring has the "Current_Pending_Sector" with RAW_VALUE=1 when inspecting the SMART attributes with smartmontools. Here is the output from smartctl.exe

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   192   181   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       5366
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       158
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000e   100   253   051    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   076   076   000    Old_age   Always       -       18234
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0012   100   100   051    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0012   100   100   051    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       153
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   110   105   000    Old_age   Always       -       40
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       1
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   200   200   051    Old_age   Offline      -       0

Considering that this is a Windows 2008 server, what is the best way to deal with this problem?

Now the following message appeared in EventLog:

smartd
2360
CRIT
Device: C:, 2 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors (changed +1)
Device: C:, ATA error count increased from 1 to 5

It appears that the drive is slowly deteriorating, I think it's best to replace it.

Answer 1

There's basically two camps regarding non-failure SMART messages:

• It's no big deal, no data was lost, the drive figured out that a couple sectors were going bad and dealt with them as it found appropriate.
• No new is good new; everything else is a sign of imminent failure.

Personally I always run RAID and have regular, monitored backups to multiple mediums (on and off site). So I ignore pre-failure conditions; I use them until they're completely dead.