Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi everyone. I hope you all had delightful evenings last night, because I sure DIDN'T .

Just last night, windows explorer (and later the entire system) froze during use of my external HDD, necessitating a hard restart. My machine froze before starting windows, with no power to my peripherals. I tried again with the disk unplugged and was able to log in and reconnect the drive. After a short hangup the device was recognized by explorer and HDDsentinel. So far the contents and performance of the drive appear unaffected,
outside of one horrifying warning.

HDDSentinel shows the health of my precious HDD as 9% with 1544 bad sectors identified, 12 days estimated lifetime! Prior to this incident there was 0 history of previous errors, and performance is still listed as 100% after a short self-test. The event log shows this drop in health happened at the exact time of a system freeze; I don't know whether the hard drive caused the crash, or if this spike in bad sectors was a result of data loss from the crash.

Currently my plan is to keep the problematic drive unplugged, buy a replacement and use HDD Raw Copy to immediately clone it, minimizing further use as much as possible. I'm worried that any more up-time could cause additional degradation, but I'm quite new to this.

How cautious I should be about running HDDsentinel's tests before I migrate the data? Thanks!

I'll upload pictures when I summon the courage to reconnect the drive.

Yes, this is generally a very common situation - as problems may remain undetected for very long time (even years).
Such described exactly at Support -> Knowledge Base -> Hard disk cases -> Bad sectors:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_ca ... ectors.php

This is exactly why it is recommended to perform tests to reveal problems - long before they may cause actual data corruption / loss, see
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

Usually CLONING a drive which is not perfect and may have damages, corruptions or may likely fail (when such high amount of problems detected so quickly) is a BAD idea. Cloning can happily start saving unused sectors, temp files, corrupted/damaged files - and the drive may fail (or "just" produce other issues) before the real, important data could be saved.
So personally I'd much more recommend to perform manual backup of the IMPORTANT files / data first. System, updates, programs, etc. (which can be re-installed) may be not as important to be cloned.

After the important files saved, yes, it may be good idea to perform the tests mentioned above, to reveal any possible further issues and may attempt to stabilize, improve the situation (which is usually possible on drives with higher health, less problems). But it may worth a try - as if the drive status can be stabilized by the Disk menu -> Surface test -> Disk Repair test or the Disk menu -> Surface test -> Reinitialise disk surface test, then the hard disk may be still usable for secondary storage.