Woke up today to 2 notifications from Unraid:

Which is confusing because 100 would be a good value. On the SMART report the raw value is 100 but it's still marked as FAILING. And the report says "Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA."

I panic bought another drive which was frustrating with the current market prices, but I then did some research and it seems like it could still work? I'm reading a lot of threads about failing helium levels but a drive still functioning for months or years after. I do have 1 parity drive and anything super important is redundancy backed up elsewhere.

The drive is 5+ years old and out of warranty, so RMA'ing it isn't possible. My speculation is it's just a sensor failure if it reported 1 then 100? But if I try to run a SMART Short Test it just immediately fails:

Anyway, I've attached the full SMART report to this thread.

What is the risk if I cancel my order and keep this drive going? I just shouldn't really be spending $250 right now if I don't have to. But I know having a hot swap replacement is a good idea also.

WDC_WD120EDAZ-11F3RA0_8HGWXH9H-20260125-1010.txt

I would replace simply because you can't complete a self-test to discover if it had some other problem.

16 hours ago, s449 said:

On the SMART report the raw value is 100 but it's still marked as FAILING.

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAGS    VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE
  22 Helium_Level            PO---K   001   001   025    NOW  100

In this case the "value" column is the one that matters; it's 100 for a good disk, which dropped to 1

AFAIK it's known that the sensor in some WD He drives is unreliable, and there have been people using some with "failing" levels for years more with no problem.