Should I RMA my Hard Drive?

[digitalsoft]

One of the Hard drives in my media server has been playing up the last week or so.

System OS is Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS
Hard drive: 3TB WD Green drive

I've been getting read I/O errors constantly; quite often I'd find that the drive wont even start up or display on the POST screen. Ran a self-test yesterday, says drive is 'OK' but there are 21 bad and pending sectors. So I ran an extended self-test which failed.

Last couple of days the drive seems to power every time I'm able to transfer data and I'm no longer getting read errors, so I'm unsure whether I should RMA the drive or not? Is 21 sectors bad? Seems strange that one minute it's in meltdown, the next it's working as normal...

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

[+BudMan MVC]

Is it failing short or extended tests now?

If so then yes RMA - if it passes both of those tests, quite often they will not let you RMA it anyway.

[digitalsoft]

It's passing short tests but fails extended tests every time.

I'm guessing the 21 pending bad sectors pretty much means it's failing?

[+BudMan MVC]

If it fails extended then yeah go online and fill out the code it gives you and get the rma going.

[Aergan]

Bad sectors on a drive doesn't mean it's failing. If the bad sector count is increasing regularly when you test it, then it's failing.

Failing any form of manufacturer set test is enough for me to RMA though if I've been having any issues at all with a drive.

[Open Minded]

I love WD but their Green Drives are absolute garbage.  I bought one and it failed right when then 2 year warranty was up.  It's only SSDs and WD Black series for me after that.  If I were in your position, I'd RMA the drive, buy an SSD and load Linux on that, get the drive back and use it as storage for things that are not important.  Or buy a Black series drive and know it's going to last.  It sucks they're so expensive compared to other drives but in this case it seems you get what you pay for.

[Mando]

tbh green series are only meant for low use and power efficiency, they basically like a 5400rpm 2.5" sata drive at best lol  i had a green for nas use and its slow R/ws drove me to distraction! swapped it with Seagate and never looked back.

Id RMA it and use its replacement for something low I/O, it  would make a decent backup usb drive on usb 2/3 scratch dump disk or something. As open has suggested get yourself a decent SSD and set up linux on it, it would fly id imagine.