How do I know whether to replace a drive showing SMART errors?

[Kelby]

I have a WHS 2011 home server with 9 hard drives in my pool.  I had a fright when one of my drives (a 6TB WD Red Pro drive) had some problems and it screwed up my drive pool.  Fortunately, upgrading to the latest beta of DrivePool enabled me to salvage my data and remove the drive from the pool.

 

Now I'm trying to sort out whether this drive needs to be replaced.  It is a brand new drive -- I installed it last week.  I'm using StableBit Scanner, and the only SMART issue is 2 reallocated sectors.  I am running a scan using Scanner now.  Is the fact that I have 2 reallocated sectors enough reason to push WD to RMA it, or should I be looking for something beyond that?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

If this is a new drive and it already has 2 reallocated sectors ... I'd personally go ahead and RMA the drive, as this indicates that there is already an issue with the drive. 

 

 

However, if StableBit Scanner is able to run a full surface scan without any issues, you may be fine.  Worst case, you could see about running "chkdsk /b" on the disk, as this is a very in depth and rigorous test of the drive. If that passes without any issues, you should definitely be fine.