HDD showing failing health

I have an external hdd that is showing 43% health rating.

I got everything off it and thought I would run a Check Disc to see if anything could be done to improve it.

Upon running the program, my memory usage went to 15.9 of my 16 gb memory.

I shut it down - would it be better to run the program in Safe Mode?

I've got plenty of hdds, so I really don't care about this one - just curious.

 

You might check the drive mfr's website to see if a firmware update is available for that model. If so, it will sometimes (but not always) improve the condition of the drive. If it's a WD or Seagate, they also have advanced drive checking software available on their websites for free.

This being said, I am very wary of using any drive that shows severe or repeated issues in CHKDSK. The cost of a new drive is usually much cheaper than losing the data on the old one.