

Ensuring the HDD was correctly connected and the connector was clean didn't help either. And I could hear the HDD "struggling" and making noise as trying so hard to read just a couple of bytes (and could see the raw read error rate increase a lot just after any of those operations.). Opening the file manager could take even seconds, as well as opening other programs or files. The reason why I posted this question was because I started to realize that the HDD was noticeable slower than before. And although the normalized value has decreased, it is still way above the threshold. I have seen this counter reset to 0 more than once since I posted this question. After some time, I can confirm that the raw read error rate value isn't very meaningful nor reliable.
