I'm a new Unraid user moving from a QNAP 2 disk device running TrueNAS. After several instances of some bizarre behavior with the TrueNAS server wigging out and adopting my firewall/router IP address and creating general havoc and knowing the drives in it are 4 years old but going strong with no smart errors, I built a new system with more drive capacity and much faster CPU. I wanted to make the most of the usable life of the older drives and have the protection of Parity drives.

I created the Array with the 2 4-year-old Ironwolf 4TB drives and because they have been pain free, I picked up a new 8TB Ironwolf as the Parity drive with the intent to and a 2nd 8TB parity drive in a few weeks for extra redundancy.

At about 11 hours into the parity sync operation, I noticed warnings of uncorrectable / reallocated sector errors on the new 8TB Parity drive. I ran a smart test without stopping the parity sync process and it's now showing 14 reallocated sectors with a threshold of 10.

The motherboard in use has only ever had 1 NVME installed and was trouble free for a couple of years before being repurposed for NAS duty. The NVME was left installed was configure as a parity couple with a couple of SSDs to create a cache.

1. I'm assuming this means the new drive is near infant mortality?

2. I'm assuming despite any potential motherboard SATA hardware related issues, if there is any, it would not result in sector failures?

3. Anyone with similar experience? The last time I had drive issues was my 10GB WD many years ago. I normally replace a drive when it hits the 3-4 year mark.

4. I've attached the smart report. It does indicate the drive passed, but Unraid indicates otherwise. Is this a monitor and see if it gets worse, or atypical of drives today? Not that many years ago, sector reallocations were acceptable. I'm debating on reaching out to Seagate to warranty replacement, but if the smart report says it's passing, I'm not certain what their level of support is like.

Thanks!

ST8000VN004-3CP101_WWZ9QDSW-20251010-1935.txt

You can run an extended SMART test to confirm, but that disk appears to be failing; there are pending sectors.

7 hours ago, JorgeB said:

You can run an extended SMART test to confirm, but that disk appears to be failing; there are pending sectors.

I took the array off line, moved the drive to a different slot / controller which was a recommended ASM1166 controller and each successive extended smart test results in the test stopping at about 10% with a new reallocated sector error.

I may bite the bullet and pick up a WD Red locally and the drive replacing this failing drive will be added as storage later.

Thanks!

Edited October 11, 2025Oct 11 by roadgator