Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi, two weeks ago I found in a trash can an old HP Pavilion dv6, after a quick test I found out the mobo was fried (usual on pavilions tho), but the HDD seemed to be OK, so I was curious and plugged it to my PC which has HDS installed and showed 99% Health, the partitions also showed up on My Computer
As I was browsing the HDD sounded normal and every file was accesible (I'm aware how unreliable are Toshiba HDD's so I was planning noot to keep important data on it), but to make sure I formatted it with HDAT2 from Hiren's Boot CD
I fell asleep, and when I woke up next morning the write got stuck at 432 gb more or less, it was showing the error "controller failure"
I ran a read test this time, but when it reaches the same area the whole system hangs up, even caps lock key stops responding, so I connected again and this time it showed the following


There are 1555 bad sectors on the disk surface. The contents of these sectors were moved to the spare area.
Based on the number of remapping operations, the bad sectors may form continuous areas.
There are 123 weak sectors found on the disk surface. They may be remapped any time in the later use of the disk.
428 errors occured during data transfer.
In case of sudden system crash, reboot, blue-screen-of-death, inaccessible file(s)/folder(s), it is recommended to verify data and power cables, connections - and if possible try different cables to prevent further problems.
More information: http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_cas ... _error.php
It is recommended to examine the log of the disk regularly. All new problems found will be logged there.

It is recommended to backup immediately to prevent data loss.


So I did the following, I like to use a linux/windows dual boot, I used primary 4 partitions and left 22 GB unallocated at the end, I know it is a hail Mary trick, but it keeps working fine, even ran a Windows 10 Anniversary Update with no errors and I install big programs frequently from 1 GB and up, my question is the following, should I buy a new one or I can keep going with that? as I said, no important data is stored on it, I just use it to run my laptop for studying

I need to know because I start college in two months and I need to get ready for investing on it.

Greetings

Gabriel

Yes: generally when you first connect the drive, it shows the last known status, last recorded information (which seemed so positive).

But since that, the drive may received mechanical shock, may dropped, trashed etc... which caused lots of other issues.
This is why I ALWAYS recommend intensive testing first ESPECIALLY on used drives to reveal problems (or confirm that situation), as suggested at
Support -> Frequently Asked Questions -> Hard disk health is low or recently changed or I just installed a new (used) hard disk. How can I perform a deep analysis?
https://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests

The mentioned solution is not bad, but not really effective. Simple formatting can ignore performance issues, slowly / harder accessible regions, retries etc.... so personally I'd perform the Disk menu -> Surface test functions instead. They not only verify these but also records changes, possible new problems too.

Personally I'd not trust a such drive with so much (and so much different) problems even if the used capacity is limited this way (which is generally a good idea to prevent accessing of problematic area - but may not always effective).
Maybe for secondary storage eg. moving data from one PC to an other - so if it dies not a big catastrophe.
But I'd not attempt to install OS on it and would not rely using as primary drive in a system.

If it is acceptable that one day may fail completely or some files may become unavailable/lost/damaged or the system may refuse to start (Murphy's law: at the WORST time) then you may continue using it of course. This is the decision which you should make depending on the reported health, problems (and maybe change of the status as new problems/degradations will be expected).

Thanks, as you said is a secondary storage, I'm also looking forward to buy the full version of HDS, even the trial version has no rival, and I made a little research of what full version does, and I think is a new must-have for me. As I have 2 home servers, thank you for the excellent support and congratulations to developers