Hardware Are Pending Sectors Bad?

[Dominator211]

My laptop was a little slow and laggy today. After a few restarts, everything seems to be back to normal. I ran a CHKDSK and everything came back fine. I opened CrystalDiskInfo and it said "Caution" and something about pending sector count. I am not great with hard drives so what are "pending sectors" and are they bad. or do I not need to worry about this issue

 

[Y0shII]

Current Pending Sector Count S.M.A.R.T. parameter is a critical parameter and indicates the current count of unstable sectors (waiting for remapping). The raw value of this attribute indicates the total number of sectors waiting for remapping. Later, when some of these sectors are read successfully, the value is decreased. If errors still occur when reading some sector, the hard drive will try to restore the data, transfer it to the reserved disk area (spare area) and mark this sector as remapped.

https://kb.acronis.com/content/9133

Not sure if you are still having the same problem, however I suggest that you do a backup as soon as possible to avoid any data loss. For experience I can tell you that a hard drive in that state can be degraded further and make backup difficult or almost not possible; I am currently dealing with a laptop with the same problem and there is already data loss, also I have a desktop hard drive with the same problem that gets worse with time and I use as a paperweight. Running tools without any backup first is a receipt for disaster.

You can do two things after the backup:
-if possible buy another hard drive and reinstall your operating system
-you can run a full format on that drive (some tools call it "full zeroing" the drive) meaning that it will write zeroes to the drive (sometimes this will restore some of those bad sectors but not always)

I hope that you can backup all your files before the drive degrades any further, if you already did it then try either to replace the drive or run a full format.