Dead disk, or just a bad SATA cable?


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Right, I was ready to do some maintenance when I noticed a not so nice bright red message on my dashboard; My parity drive was doing over 900.000 errors! (Which were still racking up hard)

 

Not something you like to see... After taking the array down and popping a short self test it was all good, but the extended self test threw an error almost immediately. I'm having difficulties making heads and tails of the SMART logs, so would like to know what opinion you guys and galls have on it.

 

I was planning on replacing the drive anyway since it's an SMR disk (Got it before the whole WD Red fiasco became widespread knowledge...) but would like to know if this thing is dead in the water or if it's likely it can still be used as a regular array disk with a new cable. (which won't be in for another 2 days, ack..)

WDC_WD40EFAX-68JH4N0_[redacted]-20210429-2332.txt

Edited by iD4NG3R
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Hey there. Definitely sounds like an unfortunate situation. Don't take this as the final word, but looking at your logs, I feel like the drive is KO.

 

Justification; Your SMART tests are consistently failing at a sepcific LBA, which means it's not liklely related to a signalling issue between the drive and the controller. Further down, the scary part though -- your drive has marked 2,120 LBA addresses as "pending defects"

 

It sounds like something unfortunate has happened to that drive. I'm one of those guys who will shove an only maybe-slightly-failing disk someplace unimportant until it breaks, but personally I would not trust this drive in use.

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If the thing is unreliable (at best) I'll most likely send it back to the store under warranty since it's barely over a year old. That's a real shame since I won't be seeing it back for a few weeks but oh well, better safe than sorry! Cheers for clearing it up. 

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Regardless of the status of the drive, you should really set up notifications so that you are alerted of issues as they happen not when you happen to look at the interface.

You got "lucky" that the issue only concerned the parity drive and nothing bad happened on another drive. You might lost data the next time.

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6 hours ago, ChatNoir said:

Regardless of the status of the drive, you should really set up notifications so that you are alerted of issues as they happen not when you happen to look at the interface.

You got "lucky" that the issue only concerned the parity drive and nothing bad happened on another drive. You might lost data the next time.

I will absolutely enable this when my replacement disk arrives tomorrow, I'm on the unRAID interface basically every day but immediately knowing about ongoing issues is probably better yeah. 

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