The drive in the title failed yesterday. It's my parity drive.

After unRAID reported thousands of read errors I ran some tests and it failed even a short SMART test after about 20 seconds. I started an RMA on it with Toshiba as it's only a few months old, well within its 3 year warranty.

 

Before packing it up for shipping I started second guessing myself and once I'd removed the drive from my server I thought I'd stick it in an external hard drive caddy on my main PC and run more tests to eliminate internal connection errors in the server. I got the same fail of a SMART short test after a few seconds confirming the problem's with the drive.

 

As it's the parity drive can I send it as is? Presumably no point in trying to delete anything on it before sending it off as it doesn't contain human legible data?

 

Is it worth trying anything else with it? Only asking as it's likely going to be a few weeks before a replacement arrives at best.

4 minutes ago, awediohead said:

likely going to be a few weeks before a replacement arrives at best.

Do the advanced replacement.  Basically they overnight you a replacement right away, put a pre-auth on your CC, and when the old drive get's received by them they clear the pre-auth.

Thanks - useful info for the future. Sod's law I just finished doing the UPS collection forms for tomorrow and of course had no idea that there was such a thing as an 'advanced replacement' - assuming it's even a thing in the UK? Are you USA based Squid?

 

In the UK the RMA process for Toshiba is handled by a German company caller STORREPAIR. I'll check again but I didn't see any 'advanced replacement' option.

 

On the UK site for RMA-ing Toshiba drives there wasn't even an option for an internal drive RMA for end customers, only for distributors, I had to choose the external drive option but it then accepted the return and identified the drive model correctly from the serial. At least I'm not paying postage for the return, which I had to do with a couple of WD drives a few months ago.

 

Assuming it was going to be weeks for the replacement I ordered a new Seagate Ironwolf drive which should be here today. Now I just have to educate myself about how to put a new parity drive in! :)