[PLUG] Hard drive issue

King Beowulf kingbeowulf at linuxgalaxy.org
Sun Jun 25 17:53:44 UTC 2023


On 6/25/23 06:33, Rich Shepard wrote:
> Good morning, group:
>
> On 2022-02-06 I purchased 4 WD Red 2T 5400rpm hard drives from Amazon for
> the MediaSonic Pro external hard drive.
...
> About a week ago (I forget the exact date) as I prepared to log in to my
> desktop server/workstation I found a long display of /dev/sde1 errors on the
> console. The kernel (I assume) told me to umount /dev/sde1 and run
> xfs_repair on that drive. After reading the xfs_repair man page that's what
> I did.
>
> This morning I found a shorter message about an error on /dev/sde1 when I
> woke up the monitor. Another run of xfs_repair put the drive back to what it
> should be.
>
> I assume that WD Red drives are supposed to last more than 16 months so I
> could contact them about it. However, since daily incremental backups are
> critical for my business I'm asking for your professional advice: should I
> replace that drive (perhaps both backup drives)? If so what brand/model
> should I purchase? My internal hard drive is 2T so all the external hard
> drives are 2T. All previous external backup drives have been the size of the
> internal drive so I don't think a larger drive is warranted.
>
> Reccomendations wanted.
>

Rich,

I'd start with a check of the drive's S.M.A.R.T reported health status 
and run some tests. As root run 'smartctl' to get overall health:

# smartctl -a /dev/sdX

A nice HOW-TO is here:

https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:smart_hdd_diagnostics

and

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/S.M.A.R.T.

If the drives are failing within the warranty period, get them replaced!


I have two WD Red Plus 6TB NAS drives in my Synology NAS and they seem 
fine.  But given recent WD legal history, I may pass on additional WD 
drives. I'm also slowly swapping out the old WD and Seagate 500 GB and 1 
TB mechanical drives (now > 5 yrs old) with NVMe and SSD 1 TB drives as 
cash and sales permit (4 TB replaced, 4 TB to go!).  Mechanical vs solid 
state both have their pros/cons and for me solid state is a better choice.

-Ed




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