Is my laptop secondary HDD failing?

Hi,
My laptop has a 128gb nvme ssd which has the operating system on it and is the C drive, and a secondary 1TB seagate hdd (st1000lm035) which is the D drive. The D drive boots fine but after a random period of time will disconnect and won't reappear until restart.
I have run crystal disk info which says caution and says the problem is with reallocated sectors count (says 96 current, 96 worst, 36 threshold. not sure what these numbers mean) but all the other things are blue rather than the yellow caution. Running a seatools test seems to pass the short generic test and the smart test but when running a long generic test, after some time the D drive will end up disconnected which means it fails the test. Running a chkdsk has been successful once but usually has failed(when the drive disconnects), I've tried letting it repair the drive on boot rather than with the drive unmounted but both have resulted in the drive disconnecting, usually the chkdsk gets stuck at a certain percentage and then the drive disconnects. The drive appears in bios, it usually works fine on boot and then after some time will disconnect meaning I have to restart again. The fact it works fine at boot means I have been able to backup my data(although I had to do this in multiple efforts as it would usually disconnect mid file transfer). When it disconnects, going to disk management to try and get it to recognise the disk again does not work. The drive appears in the hidden section of device manager when it ends up disconnecting. I've tried uninstalling the driver on device manager and rebooting and it still hasn't changed a thing. Over the past few months i would occasionally get a notification that I needed to restart to repair drive errors which were related to the D: drive (I think there are some corrupted files or something), though the drive never stopped working and I presumed chkdsk had dealt with those problems. I'm not sure what to do, I've ended up buying a 2.5 sata ssd in case I need to replace the hdd but before I open the packaging I'd like to confirm that the hard drive is indeed failing.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

steve108 said:

wessamallami hello and welcome to tenforums ,

I would replace it based on what you've reported from Crystal Disk Info and other Seagate test. Reallocated sector count going up is not good. It's probably going to get worse soon.

Thanks for the advice, yes I will probably replace it.

Bree said:

Welcome to Ten Forums.

The most meaningful value for '05 - Reallocated Sector Count' is one that you didn't give - the Raw value. This tells you the actual number of reallocated sectors (in Hex by default, you can change it to display Decimal numbers). If CrystalDiskInfo has a yellow/caution mark against this then that means the raw value is not zero (as it should be for a healthy disk).

Another value that should be zero on a healthy disk, but probably isn't, is 'C5 - Pending Sector Count'. These are possible weak sectors that may need reallocating soon.

I agree with @steve108, based on this alone that disk should be replaced ASAP.


EDIT: I do hope this isn't catching, I've just realised that the laptop I'm writing this on also has an ST1000LM035 as it's one and only drive

Interestingly, I ran a seatools smart test and it passed that, and then ran a short generic test which failed after getting stuck at "random read" on 4% before the drive disconnected. After restarting, I checked crystal disk info, and changed the raw value to decimal as you suggested, which has a raw value of 3032. I'm assuming thats quite indicative of a problem so I will be replacing the drive.

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steve108 said:

After you replace the, you may want to try a full reformat of the drive, then check health again with CDI to see what it says.

As I've already backed up the data and purchased a new drive which will be replacing it, do you suggest that I try formatting the current drive before I take it out of the laptop?