Drive reliability after Healthy (At Risk) status

[blk95civicex]

I have a WesternDigital WD2000BB drive that just last night started to act slow. I tried to analyze it using defrag, but it would hang. I checked Disk Management in Computer Management and the status of the drive was "Healthy (At Risk)." After determining that the drive was no longer under warranty and backing up all data, I tried using the WD tools to test the drive. After an extended test the drive came back with a message stating that there were errors on the disk that could be fixed, so I chose to fix them which took about 5 seconds. After this, I went back to Disk Management and "Reactivated" the drive which in-turn changed the status to "Healthy." Drive seems to work just fine now. It seems to have been a "soft" bad sector and not a hardware issue, as the drive is and always has been, near silent. My question is this: How reliable the disk is after this issue? Have any of you had a similar issue and how long were you able to use the fixed disk after your repairs?

 

[DougLite]

Good call backing up. Make it a habit, you'll be happier in the long run. Relegate it to a secondary role and run the extended test again in a month or two. If it develops bad sectors again, scrap it or sell it with the "as-is" condition. If the problems never recur, continue to use it until it fails totally