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.
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.