Disk died 2 months after end of warranty

[HolyK]

(this is just a enrage topic, nothing more, nothing less...)

Aaaaaaarrrggghhhhhhhh....

And when i checked at WD page via serial number ...

Expiration Date: 8/9/2013
OUT OF LIMITED WARRANTY

 

[titan_rw]

Are you sure it was purchased on the date they say the warranty ends? If you can prove you purchased it later, maybe they'll give you a break on the warranty.

Depends on the retailer / reseller. My local one has pretty quick turn around. I know whenever I've checked, I'm always getting products that were only manufactured a few weeks before.

 

[HolyK]

Well, i got this one from another person for half of the price without invoice, so i can not RMA locally. Disk was nearly new (was running in test PC for few hours) and was working for more than two years, without any issues, no reallocated sectors, no errors, nothing. And today i got first auto-email from SMART short test, i launched long test - same errors. So i started MHDD to reallocate pending/unstable sectors and reality is that the disk is totally f*ked up... I am glad that i did not had any data on it yet...

After some scanning time disk will lockup...


Aaaaaand this is the end ....

 

[joeschmuck]

Yes, that is how it goes, great timing on the manufacturers part. I still like buying drives with a 5 year warranty but they always come at a price. My NAS drives are all WD Reds so 3 years is it. And SMART typically tells you you are in trouble and rarely gives you a warning prior to a catastrophic failure. Glad you didn't have anything of value on the drive.

 

[survive]

Hi HolyK,

Side question for you....

What are you using to test the drives?

-Will

 

[HolyK]

2 joeschmuck: Well, warranty for all of my disks in RAIDZ2 will end at the same time. I don't want to risk the situation like the one above, so what about generating some random BadBlocks and RMA them one by one before and of the warranty ^^

2 survive: MHDD - this is awesome low-level (DOS) tool for disks. (If you will not see your disk in it, change the controller to IDE just for the test, then change it back)

 

[joeschmuck]

I think it's a sweat idea to RMA the drives if you can, I know I would. So I do hope I have a few failures before the warranty expires on my drives, just not all at the same time. It costs a lot to replace six drives. Honestly I might rethink my pool by then as I don't currently feel I need as much space as what I have, I think I could drop down to five 2TB drives and be happy, I just want to retain RAIDZ2 format.

 

[cyberjock]

MHDD sounds like smoke and mirrors to me. For example:

This software can make precise diagnostic of the mechanical part of a drive, view SMART attributes, perform Low-level format, bad sector repair, different tests and tens of other functions.

View SMART attributes: not that big of a deal as smartctl can do that.

Perform low level format: Really? Last time I checked the only way to do that was to directly connect to the disk firmware via serial cable(I've done this before...) This hasn't changed in over 20 years from what I know and was "removed" when "IDE" was invented. Only the older RLL/MFM drives would let you(and even then not all of them from what I've read).

Bad Sector Repair: Again, really? Last time I checked bad sector repair was handled in only 2 ways; the disk itself remaps the sectors or your file system marks them bad. I'm willing to bet $1million despite never using the program that neither UFS nor ZFS are on the list of file systems it's capable of marking sectors bad in. I don't know if UFS has a "bad sector list", but I'm 99% sure that ZFS does not.

 

[gpsguy]

debug g=c800:5

I did it so many times in the years before SpinRite to have the command permanently etched into my mind.

Only the older RLL/MFM drives would let you(and even then not all of them from what I've read).

 

[joeschmuck]

SpinRite, I sure do remember that program. RLL/MFM was all the craze back in the day and connecting a MFM drive to an RLL controller to gain something like 40% more space, what a bonus! I remember my first hard drive, a used 5MB 3.5" drive. Those were the days when a program was optimized to run faster and in a small amount of RAM.

 

[HolyK]

2 cyberjock: Well, last version is from 2005 so lot of the "features" are outdated/deprecated. Anyway the sector scan still works just fine and relocation also. In my case i had several "pending"/"unstable" sectors and i did not found how to force relocate directly from FreeBSD/NAS, so i made a DOS bootable USB stick with MHDD on it and that was it. If the disk would not be that much fcked up, i could relocate unstable sectors and still use it as an "trash" one for storing some temp files or something like that, or i could sell it for a beer or two :] Also the high delays could be "fixed" via this.

 

[cyberjock]

I remember Spinrite. I have a copy of their disk here somewhere. And if you read reviews from back when Spinrite was popular people were claiming that the program was smoke and mirrors back then because even in 2005ish timeframe low level format didn't exist for any disk you'd see in the field. It did do a decent job of data recovery though.

But the whole story of reading and writing the data to "refresh" the magnetic domains on the platters was laughable at best. The really screwed up part, I've met quite a few IT people that have used that feature to "refresh" SSDs... morons...

 

[HolyK]

Refreshing SSDs .... :D

 

[paleoN]

And if you read reviews from back when Spinrite was popular people were claiming that the program was smoke and mirrors back then because even in 2005ish timeframe low level format didn't exist for any disk you'd see in the field.

SpinRite 6 never had any low level format capability and the author never claimed such.

But the whole story of reading and writing the data to "refresh" the magnetic domains on the platters was laughable at best.

Yes. Yet, you do realize this effectively automatically does what HolyK is using MHDD for? Though I don't think it always reallocates.

The really screwed up part, I've met quite a few IT people that have used that feature to "refresh" SSDs... morons...

Some people shouldn't be in IT.