Why did my drive fail after only 2 months.

[Woozy Face]

Hi there,
I have mirrored 2 x WDC_WD20EZBX-00AYRA0 with ZFS, also did set up minimum power consumption.

But still my drive started to you guessed it, click! As if I bought a zipdisk... :O

The drives are handled with utmost care and shockproof mounted, that is all 4 screws!

How can it still die, are there any settings I missed, and how bad is

Read Errors: 2

Write Errors: 63

Also can i try to fix these bad sectors or defrag?

Thanks!

 

[Samuel Tai]

It's called infant mortality.

Infant Mortality

Nuts & Volts Magazine is written for the hands-on electronics hobbyist, design engineer, technician, and experimenter.

www.nutsvolts.com

This is why we recommend burning in drives before putting them into production, so they if they succumb to infant mortality, they won't risk active data.

You'll need to replace your faulty drive.

 

[Woozy Face]

It's called infant mortality.

Infant Mortality

Nuts & Volts Magazine is written for the hands-on electronics hobbyist, design engineer, technician, and experimenter.

www.nutsvolts.com

This is why we recommend burning in drives before putting them into production, so they if they succumb to infant mortality, they won't risk active data.

You'll need to replace your faulty drive.

I wish there would be ∞ mortality!

Thanks for the info, let's get some warranty work going, cause a dead drive with in 2 months is just a meme….

 

[somethingweird]

<-- newbie Question

Question - Aren't WD20EZBX SMR drives? - I know ZFS Raidz don't like them is that also true for Mirroring?

 

[Samuel Tai]

<-- newbie Question

Question - Aren't WD20EZBX SMR drives? - I know ZFS Raidz don't like them is that also true for Mirroring?

Good catch! Yes, these are SMR drives, and aren't recommended for ZFS applications.

 

[Woozy Face]

<-- newbie Question

Question - Aren't WD20EZBX SMR drives? - I know ZFS Raidz don't like them is that also true for Mirroring?

Meh, because… Yes they are, but why wouldn't it work?

 

[Woozy Face]

Good catch! Yes, these are SMR drives, and aren't recommended for ZFS applications.

Now I feel bad, which one are recommended in the same price range?

 

[Samuel Tai]

Meh, because… Yes they are, but why wouldn't it work?

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

www.truenas.com

They are appropriate for write-once, read-many scenarios. This isn't the case in a drive replacement scenario, and resilvers can stress SMR drives to the breaking point.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Now I feel bad, which one are recommended in the same price range?

WD Red Pluses are CMR. (WD Reds used to be all CMR, but Western Digital snuck in SMRs in Reds below 6 TB. The subsequent uproar and loss of goodwill forced them to restore CMRs in the Red Plus line, but the ordinary Reds below 6 TB are still SMR.)

 

[Arwen]

Meh, because… Yes they are, but why wouldn't it work?

Basically Western Digital SMR drives have a firmware bug that causes a sector not found error, (if I remember correctly).

ZFS can combine reads of data blocks into 1 command to the disks. For example, say ZFS wants blocks 8 & 10, so it makes a single request for 3 blocks starting at 8. However, WD SMR drives won't return data if it has not been written, so if ZFS never wrote to block 9, the 3 block read fails.

At least that is my understanding.


Seagate's SMR Archive drives don't seem to have this bug. I have an 8TB model and it works fine with ZFS for my backups. Writes to it are slow, as are ZFS scrubs. However, my backups are not time constrained. They can take as much time as they want.

 

[Woozy Face]

Basically Western Digital SMR drives have a firmware bug that causes a sector not found error, (if I remember correctly).

ZFS can combine reads of data blocks into 1 command to the disks. For example, say ZFS wants blocks 8 & 10, so it makes a single request for 3 blocks starting at 8. However, WD SMR drives won't return data if it has not been written, so if ZFS never wrote to block 9, the 3 block read fails.

At least that is my understanding.


Seagate's SMR Archive drives don't seem to have this bug. I have an 8TB model and it works fine with ZFS for my backups. Writes to it are slow, as are ZFS scrubs. However, my backups are not time constrained. They can take as much time as they want.

Do you have a model number for me?

 

[Arwen]

@Woozy Face - Model of the Seagate Archive?

Not sure if the Seagate Archives are still be sold... and why would you want one?
Just used it as an example of proper firmware, compared to Western Digital's Red SMR drives.

If you are asking about the Western Digital Red SMR drives, that's around this forum somewhere.

 

[DigitalMinimalist]

I’m soon replacing my second 10TB WD Gold - 1x DOA, 2nd just died, 3rd (replacement of DOA) shows issues.
Most expensive disks I ever bought and the most issues.

Never rely on RAIDs and always have a proper backup strategy

 

[Woozy Face]

@Woozy Face - Model of the Seagate Archive?

Not sure if the Seagate Archives are still be sold... and why would you want one?
Just used it as an example of proper firmware, compared to Western Digital's Red SMR drives.

If you are asking about the Western Digital Red SMR drives, that's around this forum somewhere.

The Seagate ones are still available, yes at least in our web shop which is API connected with our supplier.
I was just wondering which ones would be recommended by other forum users, since you are the ones in the field right!

Never rely on RAIDs and always have a proper backup strategy

Sure we all know that. That's why I've shutdown the NAS for now.

 

[Woozy Face]

Also, I have started an RMA and going to ask my supplier to swap those disks for some good ones. They are usually quite a cool supplier, last time when they screwed up an order of 32 GB DDR4 ram modules, they sent me the right ones and let me keep the wrong ones = free ram :D!

 

[Arwen]

The Seagate ones are still available, yes at least in our web shop which is API connected with our supplier.
I was just wondering which ones would be recommended by other forum users, since you are the ones in the field right!
...

No, I do not recommend Seagate Archive SMR drives. At the time I bought mine, it was early days for 8TB hard drives. The Seagate Archive 8TB SMR drive was one of the very first high capacity drives, that had a reasonable price. Since my pool had 8TB total usable space, that made the Seagate Archive 8TB SMR drive a reasonable match for a backup drive. Using ZFS on the Seagate Archive 8TB SMR drive gave me a chance to valid it and it's firmware, because I run a scrub before every backup. Thus, while a good backup for me, at that time, not now.

Today, I would not consider the Seagate Archive line for my backup drive(s). (Nor as data drive in a ZFS pool...) In fact, 2 years ago I went and bought a 12TB CMR drive for another rotation in my backups.


Now if Seagate were to make a 30TB/35TB SMR drive, at a reasonable price point, that would be something I'd consider. I mean basically a SMR drive can double capacity. So in theory a 16TB CMR drive could become a 30TB SMR drive, (accounting for overhead). And maybe an 18TB or 20TB CMR drive could also have a SMR counter part...

In my opinion, SMR has a place for backups and archival storage. With a bit of tweaking, like adding a 8GB flash write cache and some copy on write firmware, SMR could be better than it is today. (Their is reason to believe that Seagate Archive SMR drives use a few cylinders of the disk as a CMR write cache... but I would think flash memory would be a better option.)

 

[Stux]

I’m soon replacing my second 10TB WD Gold - 1x DOA, 2nd just died, 3rd (replacement of DOA) shows issues.
Most expensive disks I ever bought and the most issues.

How are your drive temperatures? Are you keeping them around 40C or lower?