The drive has been only been powered on and used for read over the last 3+ years. CrystalDiskInfo reports it’s bad but CrystalDiskMark shows decent read/write speeds. Only wrote to it in the very beginning when I dumped a lot of archives into it. Otherwise, very few actual write cycles which is making me think it’s still ok to use. However, this isn’t a NAS drive and is consumer-grade bought many years ago.

Thats bullshit. I have multiple drives that have pending sector count higher then 1 and they perform perfectly fine after that for years now.
Calling it bullshit is funny.
Just because it might be working for you, the reliability of the drive under load is compromised.
This literally means there’s data changes awaiting a new replacement chunk to be allocated after a region deemed unstable. If this number doesn’t return to zero I a timely fashion, it means there’s data changes unwritten.
If you run a raid, expect issues from any drives with pending sectors.
This is from experience managing statistics on dozens of data centers… Not sure what ShortNotes use case is, but my priority on a storage device is data integrity.
For data integrity you do not rely on single drives but on for example FS that handle that.
As i said in another post, the important thing about smart is not the values itself but if they are start to increase or not.
And even if an read error occurs, the sector gets remapped and you can restore the block/file from backup or the fs will handle it without interference.
Ok, but that doesn’t work on hardware raid. Regardless, his drive has already failed remapping and it’s dying.
I use ZFS too. That’s not the issue.
This is pointless since the op asked about single drive and the numbers show it’s failing. Pending means stuck, and uncorrected means it won’t get any better.
In this case , they shouldn’t trust the disk with anything they care about. That’s it.
Yes in this case i would not disagree. The overall stats look no good and if it is a single drive then yes. Get the data off.
I take issue with the general statement of yours: