I was running the reinitialize disk surface test because I wanted to clear the pending sectors. When I did that however I got a bunch of scattered green spots on my disk and they are all at the front. When I run a normal read test they are light green but each time a reinitialization is run, it causes random dark green spots. Is this something I need to be concerned about?
20210827-072703_RI_HITACHI_HTS725032A9A364_100810PCKC04BPG1B20J_PC3ZC70F-surface-full.jpg (573.96 KiB) Viewed 1659 times
It seems the beginning of the surface can be written slowly only: the darker green blocks indicate that these areas perform slower than expected.
This is not rare if the Health of the drive is not 100% (I see 70% on the bottom) and this may indicate that the affected area can be damaged with time: pending sectors may appear there again.
In this case, a good partitioning may be helpful: you can create a small partition to the beginning of the drive and then a big one to the rest of the drive for actual use.
This small partition can be eg. 50 GBytes, considering the position of the last darker block and the size of each blocks - but if you move the mouse over the block, then you can see the actual sector and MB position on the bottom.
You do not need to format the first small partition of course and can delete it after the big one created (which you can format as preferred).
This way you can use the drive with slightly reduced capacity - but with more safety as then the affected area will be not read/written, so the slower sectors will not contain any important files at all.
