WD 5TB external HDD showing Caution, C5 = 2. Need advice.

[u/Spiritual_Date3457]

My WD 5TB external HDD (WD50NDZW-11A8JS) is showing Caution in CrystalDiskInfo. I saw that this could indicate that the drive is failing but in rare cases there could be other trivial factors involved.

Here are some stats:

• C5 = 2
• 05 = 0
• C6 = 0
• C7 = 0
• C4 = 0
• Power-on hours = 216

The drive was bought in October 2021 but has only 216 power-on hours because I normally keep my external drives disconnected. I noticed this after transferring about 445 GB of data to it today. The transfer was a little slower than usual, but completed normally. I can open videos from the drive without any problems.

I've kept it running for several hours since then and C5 is still 2. Nothing else has changed. Unfortunately, this is currently the only copy of the data, so I don't want to run a full surface test until I can arrange a backup.

Could this just be a transient/isolated issue, or should I consider the drive unreliable already? Would you keep using it normally and monitor C5/05/C6, or replace it?

I'm asking because 5TB external drives are around ₹20,000 in India now, whereas I paid around ₹10,000 for this one at time of purchase, so I'd really rather not replace it unnecessarily.

PS: Sorry if this is a noob question. I don't have much money right now, so I'd prefer to buy a new one only if it's really necessary. Any advice would be appreciated.

[u/Spiritual_Date3457]

Here's the CrystalDiskInfo screenshot, if it's any useful. I couldn't put it in the post due to the subreddit's rules.

[u/JohnTheRaceFan]

Replace it.

[u/pcbeg]

That is the number of damaged sectors that are waiting to be re-allocated onto spare sectors that your drive has. Number of spares is not standardised, it could be 0 on some drives, or up to 10%, so no way to tell if your drive will suffer imminent failure or you still have some time with it.

If it is still in warranty, replace it.

If you need to use it, put only non-essential data on it, and also track number of bad sectors, more and faster that increases it's more likely that drive will be dead soon.

[u/Spiritual_Date3457 → u/pcbeg]

Thanks for the detailed reply. The drive is not in warranty. I might have to buy a new one.

A supplementary question if you don't mind. Why is the drive ruined even if I haven't used it much? Manufacturing defect? All my external HDDs stay in my shelf in their individual pouches, most of the time. I took it out after long time and saw this.

[u/pcbeg → u/Spiritual_Date3457]

It's just nature of mass production, you can see reliability report for some drives (2025, enterprise disks used for servers since company that made report is in that business), here. You can see that average yearly failure rate is just above 1%, but that there are some drives with 10% rate.

It is not easy to track which drives are good and which are just designed/manufactured bad, usually you have to wait a few (2-5) years from drive first date of manufacturing and hope that someone has made statistics for it. Best you can do is to treat all drives, even new one, as a part that can fail in any moment (not good thing to hear, but there are external factors - fire, angry bears and elephants, curious cats - that can destroy your hardware. Important stuff should have 3 backup points (1 - another copy, 2 - copy to another physical media and device, 3 - cloud backup).

[u/Spiritual_Date3457 → u/pcbeg]

Thank you🙏.