My WD-Green 1TB is kicking the bucket ...


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I booted into my Linux Mint install and by happenstance I'd gotten around to messing with that dodgy WD-Blue 320gb drive from before when I fortunately spotted another problem.

 

I had the need to fire up Gnome-Disks to try and set some flags on that 320 when I noticed that my WD-Green 1tb Storage drive was colored blood red. Hmm, that's odd. I selected it and in bold, red text it read "Self-Test FAILED".

 

Ruh-roh. :( 

 

I set the flags for the 320 (MBR partitioning scheme, Legacy BIOS Bootable, for those keeping score at home), formatted it to Ext4 (and yes, I'm using the Ext2/3/4 FSD Driver in Windows, and it works fine) and now I'm in the process of data recovery ... and it's slow going. The drive is performing at 15% of the speed it normally runs at. Normally runs at 60mb/sec, I'm getting 10mb/sec at the most. Occasional I/O errors, but not many (four to be exact so far, nothing critical lost). My big concern is going to be my backed-up Movies collection, but that's more of an annoyance -- I can re-image those. I just hate doing it.

 

*sigh* Ya know you're a nerd when you spend your Friday nights doing data recovery instead of being at a Bar. :laugh:

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Data recovery took 15 hours. BLAH. The drive went slower .. and slower .. then it would pick up speed and that's when the real trouble would start up again. Input/output errors. Then it would slow down again.

 

Likely this was SMART doing its' thing, reassembling the data from the bad sectors as much as possible. I didn't lose much, to be honest. A couple of my backed-up DVD's, a few wallpapers, and a windows driver. Nothing critical, thankfully. My development, audio, and protected stuff was all okay.

 

The results of Gsmartcontrol:

 

Gsmartresult.thumb.png.552b218c37a3ce0c2

 

Uh-oh. :no: 

 

A handy little tool called "Diskscan" is doing its' thing currently, now that the drive in question has been fresh-partitioned and formatted Ext4 -- but things are not looking good at all so far.

 

Diskscan.thumb.png.e9a686061b742613436c4

 

I'd sure like to save the drive if possible. Suggestions?

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Sorry, I haven't got a clue how to help, (I'm pretty sure you're going to need a replacement, (trying to home replace parts can be more disastrous than simply replacing and copying off from it)

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IMHO...your data is way to valuable...always have good gear......a good image....and a usb backup drive. Good data is priceless.....:D

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No worries, @Aheer.R.S.. It's likely that it needs to be replaced, I've been reading that these drives have a mechanical failure defect where the read arm will park right on the platters and cause this exact same issue. Shame on Western Digital for making such a dumb mistake.

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2 minutes ago, Draggendrop said:

IMHO...your data is way to valuable...always have good gear......a good image....and a usb backup drive. Good data is priceless.....:D

No worries, I've got four drives total in my rig. Well, three now. :no: This one was the Storage drive for the home network. The whole household used it for .. well, a bit of everything.

 

That's okay though. I got everything important off it and spread out across the other drives right now. That dodgy 320 is stuffed to the gills right now -- 2.3gb free. it's holding the Movies and the critical stuff. :D 

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At least you had some warning and could take action.

 

My WD Green 6TB simply dies. It had 5TB of its capacity full and there was no indication that it was failing.

All that I get now is a constant clicking for around 30secs before it seems to switch itself off - possibly a head issue rather than the controller board.

 

Nothing is lost as the drive was only part of a backup system (both local and remote backups in place) and now I have had to share most of its contents over other drives in machines across our house - just about doable.

 

The drive is in warranty until Dec 2017 (only recently bought) and my only annoyance is that I did not setup TrueCrypt before it died, just for certain confidential information - my fault.

 

WD are being ok about its warranty, and using their typical advanced replacement service chances are a replacement drive might now be on its way. However I am trying to get a replacement from them without the drive being returned. All the paperwork has been completed for that and now I'm awaiting their decision.  

 

Whilst the SMART system monitoring did not report any impending failure I would not have heard any clicking anyway as the drive was in a Microserver remote to where my main PC is.

 

Glad that you recovered most of your stuff.

 

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11 hours ago, Unobscured Vision said:

No worries, I've got four drives total in my rig. Well, three now. :no: This one was the Storage drive for the home network. The whole household used it for .. well, a bit of everything.

 

That's okay though. I got everything important off it and spread out across the other drives right now. That dodgy 320 is stuffed to the gills right now -- 2.3gb free. it's holding the Movies and the critical stuff. :D 

I'm a little worried when you say all the critical stuff is stored on "The Dodgy 320". I wasn't keeping score at home. What's dodgy about the 320 drive, and if it's dodgy why is it holding your critical stuff (Hopefully the 2nd copy)?

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1 hour ago, warwagon said:

I'm a little worried when you say all the critical stuff is stored on "The Dodgy 320". I wasn't keeping score at home. What's dodgy about the 320 drive, and if it's dodgy why is it holding your critical stuff (Hopefully the 2nd copy)?

I only refer to it being "dodgy" because it wasn't mountable in Windows or at the BIOS level. I changed the flags when I rebuilt the partition to MBR and "Legacy BIOS bootable", but haven't checked if it is or not yet. Plus I formatted it to Ext4 -- no biggie, I'm using the Ext2/3/4 FSD in Windows also.

 

And yes, all of that is (now) 2nd copy. Everything is uploaded to another PC on the home network with enough storage to deal with it, and the user of that PC won't mess with anything.

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12 hours ago, Dibbler said:

At least you had some warning and could take action.

 

My WD Green 6TB simply dies. It had 5TB of its capacity full and there was no indication that it was failing.

All that I get now is a constant clicking for around 30secs before it seems to switch itself off - possibly a head issue rather than the controller board.

 

Nothing is lost as the drive was only part of a backup system (both local and remote backups in place) and now I have had to share most of its contents over other drives in machines across our house - just about doable.

 

The drive is in warranty until Dec 2017 (only recently bought) and my only annoyance is that I did not setup TrueCrypt before it died, just for certain confidential information - my fault.

 

WD are being ok about its warranty, and using their typical advanced replacement service chances are a replacement drive might now be on its way. However I am trying to get a replacement from them without the drive being returned. All the paperwork has been completed for that and now I'm awaiting their decision.  

 

Whilst the SMART system monitoring did not report any impending failure I would not have heard any clicking anyway as the drive was in a Microserver remote to where my main PC is.

 

Glad that you recovered most of your stuff.

 

Ouch, 6tb just crapping out on you like that. I'd be hopping mad. Glad it's under warranty -- and I'd make them do data restoration for you, and repair the drive, then send it back to you on their dime. You'd be surprised what you can accomplish when you suggest that you'll take your business elsewhere and that you wouldn't recommend their products to anyone in the future ..

 

This experience has really put me off Western Digital products now. I used to be such a big fan of theirs -- the 250gb drive of theirs I'm using as my primary System drive is still going like gangbusters, and SMART tests still show that one to be 5x5, no problems at all and no bad sectors. And it's from 2007. Strange how that worked out.

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15 minutes ago, Unobscured Vision said:

Ouch, 6tb just crapping out on you like that. I'd be hopping mad. Glad it's under warranty -- and I'd make them do data restoration for you, and repair the drive, then send it back to you on their dime. You'd be surprised what you can accomplish when you suggest that you'll take your business elsewhere and that you wouldn't recommend their products to anyone in the future ..

 

This experience has really put me off Western Digital products now. I used to be such a big fan of theirs -- the 250gb drive of theirs I'm using as my primary System drive is still going like gangbusters, and SMART tests still show that one to be 5x5, no problems at all and no bad sectors. And it's from 2007. Strange how that worked out.

 

LOL Data is not covered under warranty, nor will they do it for you. It's your fault you don't backup your data.

 

Moral of the story? Backup your data.

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The data is still there on his drive -- likely what happened is the old "read arm parking defect" problem where the read arm is physically jammed in a position over the platters themselves. It's a known manufacturing defect, and they WILL fix it.

 

Moral of the story? Don't be so quick to jump in without all the facts.

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If anyone was stupid enough to store 5TB worth of data with no backup or redundancy then they deserve what's happened to them (Y)  As Hard drives get bigger and bigger, the risk of losing even more data becomes greater.  For example, I wouldn't run a multi-TB setup without something like ZFS in a RAID-Z1 array for data, while that's not a "backup" it does help retain data integrity.  My 4x1TB setup is going 3+ years strong now but need to upgrade soon as capacity is now an issue for me. :(

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Yeah, a 4x1 ZFS would be great for my needs. You running that in a NAS? I'm considering my options for NAS, and today's the day I make a choice.

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12 minutes ago, Unobscured Vision said:

The data is still there on his drive -- likely what happened is the old "read arm parking defect" problem where the read arm is physically jammed in a position over the platters themselves. It's a known manufacturing defect, and they WILL fix it.

 

Moral of the story? Don't be so quick to jump in without all the facts.

They'll fix it by giving you a new drive. 

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As noted the 6TB Green was only a backup drive, I still have other local and remote backups, so nothing at all lost. However my only concern is that I should have used encryption on the drive once I realised that I could indeed manage with it being for backup purposes. If I had done that I would have felt more assured about returning it to WD, normally using their advanced replacement option.

As it is I'll give them a ring today as I am still awaiting their decision if they should want the drive back or not, because of the sensitive data on it. I have completed their "Sensitive data form".

 

So whilst backing up is, and always was, mandatory for whatever you place on a drive of importance so is the consideration of encryption - I was too slow on that one as my drive, less than two months old, just shows.  Another thing that I'm reminded of is that due to the remote position of my servers even if the drive had began to click before failure I could not hear it, sometimes you would get that notice of possible imminent death.

 

I sort of wish that I have just bought another WD Red now as my needs of having such a single large drive have reduced somewhat now that I have got  another micro-server online.

 

 

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