New drives - bad sectors


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Hello,

 

I am new to the forum. I am currently running a trial of Unraid for media storage. I picked up some Seagate 8TB Ironwolf drives and installed them along with an IBM M1015 HBA in IT mode. After 2 days of up time, one of the drives threw a SMART warning with 8 bad sectors. Is this normal for a new drive with the platter densities today? Just trying to figure out if I should continue building the array and watch for sector count increases, or RMA it. I know Seagate wants you to run Seatools and unless there is a physical issue/error, they will give some push back. Thank you for any advise.

 

Matt

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Yes they were all new drives. So far the other drives are fine. When I called Seagate Ironwolf support, they kept pushing their diag tool in order to RMA the drive. They didn't classify smartctl or other programs as valid which is POS. Their tool just does read tests from what I can tell. I'll proceed w/ the online RMA process and ship the drive back. 


Thank you

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  • 1 month later...
On 5/7/2019 at 12:19 AM, Vabch22 said:

Hello,

 

I am new to the forum. I am currently running a trial of Unraid for media storage. I picked up some Seagate 8TB Ironwolf drives and installed them along with an IBM M1015 HBA in IT mode. After 2 days of up time, one of the drives threw a SMART warning with 8 bad sectors. Is this normal for a new drive with the platter densities today? Just trying to figure out if I should continue building the array and watch for sector count increases, or RMA it. I know Seagate wants you to run Seatools and unless there is a physical issue/error, they will give some push back. Thank you for any advise.

 

Matt

8 bad sectors are NOT normal, especially for new drives. I have not had any new drives which passed pre-clear to develop a single bad sector during warranty period. In fact, I have not had a bad sector on a HDD (that passed pre-clear) at all in the last 20 years (wow I'm old), come to think of it - only 2 catastrophic failures.

Edited by testdasi
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@testdasi - 20 years and no bad sectors, lucky. I had an issue with some of the Seagate 1.5TB drives back in the day, but other than that I have been pretty lucky also.. knock on wood. I didn't think it was normal, but wanted to verify since I haven't bought a larger platter drive in awhile (just recently replacing my old 3TB HGST's).  After some back and forth with Seagate, they finally RMA'd the drives that failed pre-clear. I guess they didn't want to do the paperwork as they kept stating that 8 blocks is very low and not to worry. Long story short.. all is good here now. All drives are 0 bad sectors. :)

 

Side note, on your TR build. Are you running ECC or just DDR4? I've been debating on upgrading my unRAID build to Ryzen/TR, but was waiting on stability. 

 

Thanks all who replied.

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14 hours ago, Vabch22 said:

@testdasi - 20 years and no bad sectors, lucky.

 

Side note, on your TR build. Are you running ECC or just DDR4? I've been debating on upgrading my unRAID build to Ryzen/TR, but was waiting on stability. 

 

Thanks all who replied.

You forgot my key qualifiers. :D

  1. "HDD" - because SSD wears out very differently. I do have some reallocated sectors on my SSDs but only because I wear them down like nobody's business (I have one that has gone 20% over rated endurance, oh yeah). And certainly not brand-new SSD.
  2. "that passed preclear" - about 10% of my brand new HDD fails preclear. Not sure about elsewhere but in Europe, consumers protection law is pretty dang strict. So any reallocated sector after a preclear is a defect and given I run preclear immediately upon receiving the disk, such defect (singular) is detected within the first couple of days. Consumers protection law kicks in and defect must be rectified, usually in the form of an RMA.
  3. "catastrophic failure" - 1 mechanical failure (can't spin up), 1 electrical failure (CRC errors)

I run normal DDR4 at 2666 MHz i.e. not overclocked. I think as long as you don't go bleeding edge, Ryzen and TR instability is the rearview mirror.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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