Bad Luck

[hansolo77]

Why do I always seem to have the worst luck when it comes to hard drives?  I spent last summer/fall building this brand new server, with brand new everything (case, psu, cpu/ram, etc).  I've spent the bigger bucks buying true NAS server-grade hard drives.  Now you know what I wake up to on my day off?  An alert saying one of those NAS drives is experiencing difficulties and needs to be sector-checked.  So I spent the last 9 hours running a sector-check, get up to around 97% good, then all of a sudden I'm hit with over 100 unreadable sectors... back to back to back.  According to the server, I've only owned this drive for 208 days.  I'm probably going to RMA it with Seagate and get a new one.  Trouble is, I can't really afford the space to backup the un-duplicated files.  That's why I got this drive.  UHG.  Just looked, I'm now at 133 unreadable sectors.  NOPE, make that 147.

Why does this happen to me?  Did I do something wrong to piss off the computer gods or something?

[Draco1962]

Seagate. That says it all. I have often sung the praises of Western Digital.  Their Red NAS drives are the best bang for the buck. 

[stigzler]

It's prolly yer first guess (i.e. Bad Luck). Servers are temperamental things...

I'm not so sure about seagate either. I've had some go bad in a home server in the past. Moved to WD Greens and been golden for about 3 years now. 

I'd research it before you settle for replacement over refund. 

[hansolo77]

I'm going with an RMA replacement for the time being.  I just think for future purchases I might have to go with WD.  Their RMA process is painless though, and free if you don't want them to send you out a replacement drive first (otherwise it's $11.95 for the return label/packaging).  I was quite happy with this drive too, to the point where I just installed my 4th one yesterday (which prompted the discovery of this whole mess).  I'm really finger-crossing in hopes that this was just bad luck, and I won't end up replacing more so soon.  I'm mostly upset with the fact that I've only had it 208 days, not even a year, and it comes with a 5-year warranty.  The manufacturer stands by it to run 24/7 for something like 114 years (1M hours, link), and I ran it maybe 10 hours a day if that.  Maybe I should look into the Enterprise class NAS rather than the entry level NAS, as they can run in larger +16 bay enclosures (I have a 24-bay one).

All the same, when this was finally said and done, it had 1,327 "unreadable sectors".  SMART data revealed as 72 Reallocated sectors, and 1,255 in Pending/Uncorrectable. 

[Adultery]

+1 to the WD Reds. I've had too many Seagate drives fail on me, and seen too many Toshiba drives flop to ever trust either with non-redundant storage.
I'm not sure I want to know how many hours all my drives have on them. I get a status report every week in my email and only glance it for error reports. I know that info is in the email, just don't want to know.

/my 2c