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Investigating Problems with Disks
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So since purchasing both a ThunderBay and ThunderBay Mini in Sep 2015 I have had 3 (possibly 4) 5TB Toshiba X300 HDs report bad sectors and reallocated sectors and are recommended for replacement. The first 3 do continue to fail Verify and Certify attempts and I have removed them from the TB and I am in the process to see if Toshiba will RMA them even though they haven't totally failed and will still pass a basic OSX Disk Utility First Aid test.
None of the drives in my ThunderBay Mini have had any issues in the same time frame. The drives in the Mini are Samsung Momentus 2TB drives stripped out of Seagate 2TB BackupPlus externals.
The most recent odd thing is that I had removed my 4 functioning Toshiba drives from the enclosure so that I could use the enclosure to Verify and Certify the 3 "bad" drives. After those 3 continued to fail Certify and Verify I removed them to get ready for RMA through Toshiba.
I then put back the 4 working drives (these are in 2 separate RAID 1 mirrors). Immediately as the drives mounted SoftRaid said one of the four had bad sectors and reallocated sectors and recommended replacement. The system had no time to run any type of Verification as the drives literally mounted and 1 second later the error/warning appeared.
I then took that drive and tried to Certify it....after 12hrs running it passed certification and had no issues.
I'm not sure what is going on....the high amount of drive failures only from the ThunderBay and never from the ThunderBay Mini and the inconsistent results out of SoftRaid for this latest drive has me questioning the Enclosure and how SoftRaid is actually working.
Chatting with tech support got me nowhere....he asked me to replace the thunderbolt cable which I did (but the Mini has been daisy chaining through that cable all this time with zero issues) and run Certify on the disks. As above the 3 early bad drives failed and the more mysterious failed drive passed.
What is going on? Is this just a really bad run of drives from Toshiba? Seems like way too many no matter how bad the Toshiba Drives could be. Also 5 drives were bought in Sept 2015 and then 2 more in 2016 after the first 2 failures. None of the serial numbers even on the first 5 drives are even close to each other.
I suspect an issue with my ThunderBay enclosure but can get nowhere with OWC support so far. My ThunderBay is now out of warranty since Nov 2016 so not sure if there is any way to get a new one....
Any suggestions as how to proceed....
Thanks
Posted : 14/01/2017 11:39 am
This does not appear to be caused by the Thunderbay.
Drives that reallocate sectors are certainly on a failure path. That is data that SoftRAID collects directly from the drives, which can be confirmed independently.
Events that can cause disks to fail prematurely are:
Static (not using static protection when touching disks)
Shock (moving the enclosure when being used)
Power (brownouts can cause premature disk failures - get a Power Conditioner)
A reallocated sector is an event reported by a disk (and is a SMART parameter the disk stores) and is independent of the OS or SoftRAID.
Look into a power conditioner and be sure you use static precautions when handling disks. (static discharges can be so small you can't feel them, but could cause the drive to prematurely fail in the future)
Posted : 16/01/2017 2:49 pm
