Does long preclear indicate a problem with the drive?

[yoleska]

I have a set of 4 Seagate EXOS drives for my Unraid project.  I started the preclear at the exact same time for all of them.  3 of the drives pretty much finished within a few minutes of each other.  However 1 drive is taking it's sweet time.  They are all plugged into the onboard SATA controller and when preclear started the read process they were all showing around 250MB, which is good, from what I've learned.  But as the pre-read cycle was nearing 100% (maybe around 70%) the speeds started slowing down - and in this last drive down to about 140MB. 

 

My question is - does this one drive (the top one in the pic) that is taking much much longer than the other 3 drives indicate any type of problem with the drive?  I would think they would all be relatively the same speed.  They are the same MGF date, same firmware. 

 

[JorgeB]

Not necessarily a problem, post a SMART report for that drive.

[yoleska]

I had read some other forum/reddit posts where the consensus was that the controller was bottlenecked, but as you can see in this next picture, when that drive started zeroing, it had similar write speeds as the other drives.  I'm sure that the drives slow down as they get to the "end of the disk", but a 3 hour difference?  No SMART errors or anything on this disk so far.  Same temps as the other ones.  The system is a Z790 i7-12700, 64G DDR5 ram, so I doubt it's a system bottleneck .  CPU is jumping all over the place, but load is between 25-29% while the preclear is happening. 

 

[yoleska]

Sure, the report is attached. -1022 is the drive in question.  -1032 is another drive.  There are some differences.  Quick SMART test showed no errors, but it looks like there might be a few problems in this report with this first drive.  Thoughts on what those errors mean?

 

 medusa-smart-20230608-1022.zipmedusa-smart-20230608-1032.zip

[yoleska]

Crud, I just noticed this in the drive Attributes.  Think this qualifies for a new drive?  

 

[JorgeB]

SMART is showing issues for both, both have reported uncorrected errors, but especially the other not slow drive, which has more and also has pending sectors, not a good sign for new drives.

[yoleska]

Well damn.  Brand new drives and it looks like a couple of them are going to be RMA.  Seagate doesn't appear to recognize other tools for diagnostics, so I guess I'm running their Seatools on the drive to see what it shows.  Bummer...

[Kilrah]

Are these new for real or refurbished?

[yoleska]

So it turns out that these drives are OEM drives and not warrantied by Seagate.  I checked.  So they're all going back and I'll get another 4 from somewhere else. 

[Zonediver]

Seagate HDDs... dead on arrival... no surprise 😉

Edited June 8, 2023 by Zonediver

[Kilrah]

Yup not new but refurbished. It does say it everywhere on the listing though.

[yoleska]

Yeah, I think I rushed into that one based on the price and didn't do my DD.  I ordered 4 NEW (made sure) drives.  I still like Seagate, so not complaining yet about them, just the Amazon retailer.