PS3 HDD "freezing" and activity light 100% during loading.

[TheUNkilled]

So I'm having a rather strange problem which I think stems from the HDD.
For example, I'm playing a game, and when a loading screen pops up or something that needs to load from the hdd(not every loading screen, mostly has some discernable parts like specific locations, but it's still true for "most" of them)
I can see the HDD activity light goes fully on(100% usage) and of course it stays that way anywhere from 30s to 2 min(once it even hanged). I tried reinstalling the game and deleting some other ones in hopes of "moving" the sectors but that didn't help(it's a psn install).
So my first course of debugging was plugging the HDD into my pc and checking the S.M.A.R.T. data which told me there were 3 pending sectors. That does explain the lenghty 100% activity(re-trying reads) but I don't understand why it doesn't just mark the sectors as bad and move them when it does read the succesfully.

Now, I know the "default" solution would just be "buy a new hdd" but I'd like to at least try to avoid that.
If the hdd goes out completely then of course I'd get a new one, but I'd like to avoid it for now. My saves are regularly backed up.

I was wondering if anyone else experienced something like this? Maybe it's not HDD related? Although, the 100% disk activity would suggest otherwise. Any tips on where to go from here?
Thanks!

 

[Berion]

Pending sectors are those which at least once the time access was to slow than expected. They don't need to be bad sectors, they can even disappear from the S.M.A.R.T log if future reads/writes proves goes to normal (depend of course how disk firmware treating such situations, they could stay marked as pending forever). And once marked as bad, they will be relocated from backup sectors (which count are different, from 99 to 256, depend of model and manufacture). Serious problems starting when backup sectors depleted (relocation count is equal to max value from threshold).

You could try check speed those times by Victoria application.

And avoid HDD with SMR technology. They are slow and quickly faulty. With compare with games which have extremely many files (like e.g Mass Effect series) results in unexpected bugs/stuttering etc.

 

[TheUNkilled]

Pending sectors are those which at least once the time access was to slow than expected. They don't need to be bad sectors, they can even disappear from the S.M.A.R.T log if future reads/writes proves goes to normal (depend of course how disk firmware treating such situations, they could stay marked as pending forever). And once marked as bad, they will be relocated from backup sectors (which count are different, from 99 to 256, depend of model and manufacture). Serious problems starting when backup sectors depleted (relocation count is equal to max value from threshold).

You could try check speed those times by Victoria application.

And avoid HDD with SMR technology. They are slow and quickly faulty. With compare with games which have extremely many files (like e.g Mass Effect series) results in unexpected bugs/stuttering etc.

Thanks for your reply!
And yes I'm aware how pending sectors work, which is why I'm confused that it didn't relocate them yet since the loading times are extremely long on those sectors every single time.
By some logical conclusion it should have already replaced them.
I will try the Victoria app to see if it can provide more details then basic S.M.A.R.T. data.

 

[remlei]

And avoid HDD with SMR technology. They are slow and quickly faulty. With compare with games which have extremely many files (like e.g Mass Effect series) results in unexpected bugs/stuttering etc.

I dont think you can even avoid it in the first place unless you go with the SSD route, I dont think you can buy a 500gb HDD brand new anymore and all brand new 1TB 2.5inch drives are SMR. You can probably get away with it if you buy a 2nd hand 500GB or lower.

edit:

never mind, every brand new laptop hdd out there are SMR drives, by just downloading all the latest data sheet from wd, seagate and toshiba, every single of them are SMR drives, seagate mobile hdd are the only ones that still offer 500gb drives but that one is still SMR.

so the best bet is just buy old 320gb laptop hdd.