Brand new WD Red Plus 4TB drive gets stuck at 90% running smartctl long...bad drive?

[dbsoundman]

Hi all, as the title says, I just received my first of two WD Red Plus 4TB drives (purchased from different sellers) this weekend, and wanted to check it out before I stuck it in my NAS, so I put it in a USB 3.0 external enclosure and started a smartctl test on my OpenSUSE desktop PC. The exact test I started was 'smartctl -t long /dev/sda' (and yes I'm sure that's the correct disk name). I left it running overnight, but to my surprise, when I checked on it this morning, the test was still running, 90% complete. So I left it and checked again in the afternoon...still 90% complete.

I've done some googling on the topic, and it seems like others have seen this issue, but the answers were inconclusive as to whether or not this indicated a bad drive, or just a bug with smartctl, or something else. Can anyone here provide a more definitive opinion?

 

[Jailer]

I had one of my 8TB shucked drives that are currently in service do the same thing. I ended up canceling the test and running it again and it ran through without issue and has been fine since.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Connecting disks via USB enclosures for this can cause issues, at least it did for me a couple of times. You should connect it "properly" and retry

 

[dbsoundman]

Connecting disks via USB enclosures for this can cause issues, at least it did for me a couple of times. You should connect it "properly" and retry

Interesting... do most people seriously have to connect their disk via SATA to another computer to run their initial SMART tests then? I'm not really familiar with how people check their disks, I'm new to all of this.

 

[Jailer]

I'm not really familiar with how people check their disks, I'm new to all of this.

Put it in your server and run the tests before you add it to a pool.

 

[dbsoundman]

Put it in your server and run the tests before you add it to a pool.

My server only has 4 hot swap bays so that unfortunately won't work for me.

I did seem to find a solution via reddit. The solution I'm currently running is

in one terminal session, I run the smart test:

sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdX

in another terminal session, I run this loop:

while true; do sudo smartctl -d sat -c /dev/sdX; sleep 90; done

But I see another post below that seems to have a more eloquent solution:

My solution was to run:

sudo watch -d--cumulative -n 10 smartctl -t long /dev/sda

This polls the hard drive every 10 seconds (60 would fine also) and prevents it from spinning down and stopping the test with the "aborted by host" error. You also get a percentage of test with every poll and the changes are highlighted (--cumulative). My long test took 24 hours as expected.

Basically, the problem seems to be that USB-attached drives tend to go to sleep while smartctl is running, which prevents the tests from actually completing.