On 10 Nov 2015, at 8:18am, OBones <obones at free.fr> wrote: > However, using tools to read the SMART values for this harddrive, I noticed > that it had been eating up spare sectors for quite a while.
That's actually a good suggestion for you: look at the SMART values, run any hard disk diagnostics you have, etc.. Once you've backed-up, of course. > So to answer, yes, it is definitely possible that the hardware is crashing > and windows does not notice it. You will see errors that components report to Windows. But a dodgy sector on a drive may just cause the driver to retry reading repeatedly (mystery delays) at the driver level, and be reported as an error only if reading fails completely. Simon.
