fleggett1

All my pooled disks are un-drive-lettered, so it's impossible (at least to my knowledge) to reveal their individual contents with a simple "dir" command since there's nothing to latch onto for the dir argument. Maybe there's a more exotic method, like "dir \\PHYSICALDRIVE3 /S", but I've never tried that. At the end of the day, I'm still just a dumb Windows user with just a small sprinkle of dangerous commandline/terminal experience. And remember that I'd want the report to separate the file contents based on the actual disk they reside (or resided) on, not just a massive dir listing of the entire pool absent disk context. This is why I'd prefer it to be an option inside DP since the software obviously knows how to address letter-less disks. It would also be better in that DP could run the drivelisting report immediately after discovering that a disk is exhibiting extremely troubling issues. This one logging feature would've been an absolute boon in my situation that happened only a few days ago, as I still don't know what was on that drive even with dmde. I hope that makes sense.

I completely understand being soured on the whole affair. I'm seriously thinking of dumping my pool altogether and just using two or three spinners that I can fit within a standard-size case. Once drives start to go south and you permanently lose data, it calls the whole enterprise into question. And it gets even worse when a drive fails so spectacularly that not even an evacuation is possible, as was the case with my latest dead disk. I tried running dmde on it and, even with a complete surface scan, it failed to find anything salvageable. This is why it's probably going to have to be sent in for data recovery, which I know can run a thousand dollars (or more). This is also why it'd be fantastic if DP implemented that per-drive directory listing feature I mentioned earlier, as at least I would know what was lost and if it's worth re-sourcing. If I were to try this whole sorry business again from the very beginning, I'd probably get a huge case that could hold 10-15 drives and throw as many fans at them that I could. No more external enclosures with all their quirks. OR I would pay an insane amount for a true NAS, as they seem to cool drives effectively and have evacuation strategies baked-in. However, since I know very little about them, I'd lean toward the "big case" route first. And no, that would NOT mean getting a server case. I've tried that in the past with Norco cases and they just need more cooling than my ears can abide, like true Delta fans running at full throttle 24/7. I'm curious, though - with your time with the Terras, what did you think of them? Did you ever have to update their firmware?

I can't remember the specific virus, but it was downloaded via a torrent. It was detected by Windows itself and quarantined, but I don't know if it had a chance to deploy before then. I honestly don't know what caused my problems at this point. It could've been DP, the virus, or a badly coded forced update. I think it's really, really, REALLY weird that, while the machine was attempting to shutdown, it was obviously heavily writing data somewhere, as my drive activity light danced the entire time. And the activity light wasn't just pulsing a meaningless repeating pattern, but acted like what it was writing had purpose and should not be interrupted, which is why I left it up for as long as I did. Oh, I had another drive go belly-up on me three days ago. A 10 TB shucked WD. Problem is I might actually have to send this one in for data recovery, as I suspect it had some pretty unique data. In case I wasn't clear before, I am NEVER NEVER NEVER relying on shucked drives again. Those things can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. Is there a feature that could be implemented into DP that would periodically generate a directory/file listing of each pooled drive and save it somewhere? It would be a helluva diagnostic tool when a drive commits spontaneous seppuku.

SSDs also don't have the capacity that I need (at least, not in the consumer space). I'm talking at least 18 TB and more, if economically rational. I feared RAID would come into the convo. To expose my ignorance, I know very little about the tech and what I have gleaned scares the bejeezus outta me. I keep hearing the mantra that "RAID is not a backup" and have read stories of entire arrays going south because a drive or two failed and the wrong strategy was employed for a rescue. And then there's really bleeding-edge stuff like unRAID and filesystems with RAID-type features built-in, like zfs. I just want Plain Jane NTFS so that, if something goes wrong, the rest of the pool isn't dragged into the abyss or needs a rebuild that may (or may not) succeed after a few weeks of drive hammering. I also VERY MUCH like the fact that I can pull a drive from my DP pool, stick it in another Windows machine that doesn't have a clue what Drivepool is, and I can access all the files normally, without additional steps, and free from some exotic RAID implementation. IOW, I like - no, NEED - a solution that's straightforward and doesn't descend into insane complexity. I'm old and any new tricks I'm forced to learn have to be relatively simple and something I can visualize in my creaky, calcium-riddled brain. This is why DP has fit all my criteria, as it does what it needs to do to configure the pool, present it to Windows as such, and that's it. (I know the software is far more sophisticated under the hood than what I'm making it out to be, but I'm just speaking from the perspective of the "user experience".) Besides, isn't hardware-specific RAID obsolete at this point given the raw power that modern machines offer, even low-spec boxes?

I think I actually have a Seagate or two in my Terras, but I need to double-check. Didn't the floods also affect WD pretty badly? Regarding reliability, just so I'm clear, I know a drive that costs a little north of $300 won't last forever, especially if it's being written and read from almost every second of the day. Like I wrote earlier, I'd happily pay a handsome sum for a high-capacity drive that genuinely lasted, at a minimum, 8 years. It's the disposability/e-waste that annoys me, as people have now been conditioned to believe that hard drives should only last a few scant years before going bad. For those of us distributing (ahem) numerous Linux distros, it's become a chronic fear that an un-duplicated drive might implode at a moment's notice, even if that drive has only seen two or three years of use. It's kinda like what bios updating has become. Before, the necessary blocks would be written, you'd see the progress bar, and it only took a minute and a single reboot. Now, updating a bios is like a game of Russian Roulette, with numerous mystery reboots and highly disconcerting black screens throughout. It's like the technology has gotten so "advanced" that it's become proportionally brittle. Regarding the USB dropout, there's a power setting that I always turn off called "USB selective suspend setting", as it sounds like a definite no-no, but I dunno if it does what I think it does. I also make sure to disable any sleep settings. I think I am headed in the duplication direction, much to my chagrin. It's more money, more hardware, more heat, more electricity, and more software complexity, which makes me highly uneasy, even though it's suppose to do the opposite, but it's the only thing I know to do to combat all these drive failures.

That's a little surprising about Seagate, as I recall them being pretty low on the drive tier reliability list years ago. Maybe I should give them another shot. Problem with me trusting the Reds is that I've had two fail on me in the past six months, though one of them had the decency to spit out Smart errors so that I could proactively replace it (the other, by a stroke of cosmic luck, was empty). I just don't trust anyone anymore. If it wasn't for the Smart-auto-evacuate feature, I would've lost GBs and maybe even TBs of files due to failures. And I still see the occasional drive dropout, which is beyond vexing, as I don't know if it's enclosure- or drive-related. A restart is necessary to "resurrect" the drive so that DP recognizes it. It doesn't happen often - maybe once every few months - but it's teeth gnashing when it does occur and makes me think dark thoughts. I suppose I need to seriously consider duplication, which I've avoided my entire computer life due to the byte tax. I have the two Terramasters, so designating one as the primary and the other as the backup should be easy. Problem is investing around $1000 in sufficiently large drives to make it happen. My 401(a) just took a GIGANTIC hit recently with the stock market trying to find the center of the Earth, so there's no relief there (if anything, I should be putting money in to shore it up). Still, I could put three or four drives on my Amazon wishlist in the hope of pulling the trigger at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Well, I've got a handful of 2 and 4 TB Reds WDs that were still working when I pulled them for simply being too small. These drives were pretty old - probably more than ten years at this point (maybe older). At some point, once they crossed a TB per price threshold, the reliability went into the crapper. I guess you can say that about every drive company, but it pains me to lump WD into that cesspool, as I used to recommend them to everyone and their fourth cousin. Now, I have no earthly idea what make & model to get. Point taken about the 2021 date. I guess what I'm wanting is someone to come out with high-capacity drives with 10 year warranties and actually mean it. That would be a game changer for a lot of people.

Well, at least I THINK the virus was at least part of the issue. Having not had one years, though, it's impossible to say. I also don't know if the virus actually ran or was just downloaded and immediately quarantined. But, yeah, I need to revisit my list of exclusions and add stuff like "lnk" extensions, as it was a file with a .lnk ending that was the culprit. I also need to do this for torrents. Just when you think you've got the system perfected, something like this idiocy rears its head. I'm no longer shucking. After all these failures, I trust them about as far as I can disc throw them at the Olympics. From here on out, it's "real" OEM drives or bust. I don't even trust recertified drives at this point. And to pour salt into the wound, I really only "saved" a few bucks for drives that, in the end, weren't worth squat. And then there was the pain of extracting them from their enclosures and doing the 3.3V pin mod when needed. What nonsense. Sigh. I remember when WD was at the top of the reliability game. Now, they seem to be bottom-feeding like the rest of the catfish. We really need a manufacturer to step up and release a line of semi-expensive drives that won't crap their platters or blow their firmware after three or four years of relatively light use. I would pay a handsome premium for 20+ TB spinner that lasted seven or eight years.

Well, I might've inserted my foot squarely into my mouth this time. I'm still rather mystified by this series of events, but it is what it is. My system has returned to stability...without me needing to reinstall Windows. I know that sounds ridiculous, but (this time) it's true. Apparently, one of my apps that ends in *arr downloaded a virus. This made the rounds on Reddit and Windows actually caught-it, but not before my system started to go haywire. Since then, yet another Windows update came down the pipe, so I can only surmise that it, along with eliminating the virus, "cured" my box. I know that doesn't make a hill o' beans amount of sense, but they're the only things that have occurred since my last post. To summarize the current state of affairs, I can now restart normally and invoke both DP and Scanner's UI. Before, I would click on the icons for both and nothing would happen. No black screen, no crashes, just nothing would appear. I've had that happen before with other apps and a restart will usually fix the issue. So, it looks like neither DP or Scanner were at fault after all (and there was much rejoicing). I dunno if I'm brave enough to do that memory dump, as it's exactly the sort of thing I try to avoid. However, in the future, if worse comes to worst... (I'll bookmark the url.) Now, if my shucked WDs would quit dying on me, things would be peachy (I had to throw away three last month).

Well, my system is definitely screwed. Not 100% toast, but enough that I'm definitely gonna have to reinstall Windows...again. I swear, I think my old AT box I had in the 90s was more stable than this "state of of the art" contraption. I can't get the system to perform a restart. It'll get deep into the process, so much so that I can't bring ANYTHING up, but it just won't flip that last bit and do the actual deed. I still see the disk light flickering furiously, but can't even begin to figure-out why. I've checked my two Terramaster enclosures and none of their activity lights are lit, so it's something relegated to my two NVMEs. One of them is a Samsung (my boot drive), so I'm going to install Magician to make sure it's not trying to lobotomize itself. All that said, I still think it MIGHT be DP related. I suspect this because I can no longer bring up the UIs for either DP or Scanner. The pool still seems to work, but the UIs for both have gone bye-bye. When I get the system back up, I'm gonna kill the processes and restart both to see what happens, but I'm not sure that'll do anything beyond satisfying my curiosity. No other app is affected, as they all operate normally except for DP and Scanner, which is another reason why I think something is off with both. Of course, it could just be coincidence, but I'm runnin' on fumes here. Shane, I used to do boot drive images via Acronis Trueimage back in the PITA-to-install XP days. I might go back to doing that, so thanks for the Veeam rec. When I get everything back to working order, I'll run a chkdsk on all the pool drives (and pray). Christopher, I'm not using any cloud-based tech. It's just a local box running local stuff. And like I wrote, it gets too far into the restart process for manual input, like invoking Task Manager or even a simple shell prompt. I wish I could, as I'd REALLY like to know what Windows is trying to do or at least try to determine what app or process is holding-up the restart, but that's a no-go. It's all very mystifying with a huge helping of frustration, as I haven't done anything to warrant this. I got the Explorer fix from an official Windows tech on an official Windows forum, so I can't imagine it's that. Arrrghh. Maybe I really do need to try to learn some linux.

I just wish I knew what the hell the system is doing, as it's definitely doing >something<. The reason why I leveled the finger at DP is because I've only seen a rebalance or evacuation take this long. Assuming I can get things back to some semblance of normal, is there anything I can run on the pool to check file integrity? I know a simple chkdsk doesn't really cut it (I don't think it even works with DP). I don't have backups for...reasons. I'm already resigned to reinstalling Windows, which is going to be a royal PITA, as the few apps I do have installed have janky restore steps.

A few days ago, I noticed that Explorer wasn't refreshing in real-time. I did some Googling, found some hits, and did what was advised, which included restarting. So, I did. Problem is, the restart is going on TWO DAYS. I know the system is doing >something<, as the drive activity light continues to blink furiously, which is why I didn't just pull the plug after a few minutes. The only app I can think of (besides Windows itself) that would cause such behavior is Drivepool, as I keep this machine as lean and mean as possible. If that's the case, what in the world could be happening? Is it doing an impromptu rebalance? I doubt it's an evacuation, as all the drives were fine just before I initiated the restart. I can't invoke anything, like Task Manager, as it's too far into the restart process. Every keystroke I've tried doesn't bring-up anything. All I see is the black restart screen with the white circle, which has been circling the entire time. If I get up in the morning and it's still trying to restart, I suppose I will have to pull the plug, as three days will be the end of my rope. If that's the case, assuming the system comes back at all, is there a bulletproof way to check all the pool files to ensure that they're still intact? This is with Windows 11.

I told Gillware that I couldn't afford the recovery and to just ship the drive back. Cost me $30 in shipping fees. I'll try some recovery tools on my own, like EaseUS. If that doesn't work, I know there are less expensive companies to consider, as from what I understand, Gillware is one of the most priciest operations doing this sort of stuff.

I heard back from Gillware. They want $1200 AND another drive that's at least 20 TB. And they can only "guarantee" that they'll be able to recover around 80% of the disk. JFC. It's like they think the drive has been at the bottom of the sea for the past year. I was thinking $400 tops. I may never again go anywhere near diskpart. If I had known things were going to be this expensive, I would've tried using something like EaseUS first, on my own. Ughughughughughugh.

The thing is that the drive dropouts occurred seemingly at random after the Sabrent had been powered on for awhile and they only reappeared after a reboot. So, something was going awry while the disks were in their steady-state. The disks do get power simultaneously...sort of. The Sabrent is a bit odd in that, after a cold boot, each drive bay has to be hand turned on individually. There is a master power switch on the back, but it still won't power anything until you hit that specific bay's power button and only AFTER it senses USB power, which a lot of people have complained about. However, the bays will continue to be powered after warm reboots. I have no idea if it employs any smart power-up strategies, though since it's just a DAS unit at the end of the day, I sincerely doubt it. The disks I'm using are Seagate Exos and a smattering of shucked white-label Western Digitals. I'm out of the shucking game, so when the WDs go, I'll replace them with true OEMs.

I'm still restoring the pool, which'll take another couple of days (no word yet from Gillware), but I got off my duff and took the Sabrent apart. I have to say that it's really impressive on the inside, with almost everything some manner of metal. Only the front doors and a handful of other parts are plastic. Unpopulated, Sabrent says that it weighs 17.8 lbs, so it would definitely kill you if someone dropped it on your head, even drive-less. The PSU is a very cute 3.5" x 5" x 1.25" device that should be up to the task since it only has to have enough oomph for 10 drives along with the two 120mm "Runda" RS1225L 12L fans. As you can see from the label, it's a 399.6W "Mean Well" EPP-400-12 unit when cooled adequately. Since a normal 3.5 drive only consumes around 9.5W at load, that's only 95W needed for the drives, with the rest for the fans and the supporting PCB. So, assuming the PSU isn't outright lying, I don't think that's the issue. I checked mine for obvious problems, like expanding or leaking caps, but didn't see anything. The caps themselves look to be of pretty decent quality and the bottom circuit board appears clean. The unit has what looks to be a rheostat, but I have no idea what it controls. If I had to take a very wild guess, I would say there's something amiss with the backplane, as that seems to be a common source of consternation with low(er)-grade server-style boxes, like the Norco. It is interesting that I only started seeing drive dropouts once I had populated all ten bays, so maybe it works fine with only 8 or 9 bays running. So far, the two Terras are running just fine. I'm praying to all sorts of gods that it remains so.

Oh, hrrmmm, interesting. It looks like FreeFileSync did the job, but its UI looks like it was done by a madman, so I might try Robocopy next time. That fileclasses link is EXTREMELY helpful. A bit more on the pool reconstruction front. I really needed more than six drive bays to work with, so I bloodied a credit card and bought another Terra. FFS mirrored everything on the old pool to the three new Seagates seemingly fine. Oh, but before that, the Seagates long formatted successfully, so I'm considering them good to go. I'm currently long formatting three of the old pool drives, which'll take another 24 hours. Once that's done, I'll fire-up the second Terra with old pool drives and copy everything over from them to the drives that I'm in the process of long formatting (presuming they pass). Gillware has the drive. I stressed to my contact that the drive should be fine electronically and mechanically, so they shouldn't have to take it apart. I'm HOPING this will lower the cost of the recovery substantially. You would think restoring everything from a simple diskpart clean should be a cakewalk for a professional recovery service, but we'll see. Incidentally, I was looking over Terramaster's line of products and they are all-in on NAS devices, with their flagship product supporting 24 drives. I wish they would offer a 10- or even 8-bay DAS box, but then you're back to needing a beefy PSU. I still intend to take apart the Sabrent assuming it's not a nightmare to do so. That's currently all the news that's fit to print. More to come!

Okay, my way was gonna be a real PITA, so I'm doing it via the two-pool method. Unfortunately, I don't have enough (current) drivespace to enable duplication, as I'd have to get a second Terra and also stuff it with drives. Maybe in a few months I can buy some more hardware. I was copying over the pool data and it got interrupted in the last few hours. I poured over Robocopy to see how to get it to just copy the files that don't exist on the target pool, but I cannot for the life of me get the switches straight. Can you give me some pointers? Or is there a better 3rd-party copy app I should be using (treecomp?)? nvm, I stumbled across an open-source app called freefilesync that seems to be up to the task. Still, I'd like to know how to do this with something like Robocopy, though. BTW, Gillware said they could look at the drive, but the recovery cost was probably gonna be steep. Ugh.

The drives long-formatted just fine. That's one hoop jumped. Now, I can start rebuilding things, but I need some pointers. Three of the drives in the Terra are part of the (old) pool and is being recognized as such. I want to create a new pool using the three Exos as the base, but I don't want DP to have to contend with two pools going simultaneously. I know the software is designed to support multiple pools, but I want to keep things as simple as possible. Plus, in the end, I only want the one pool. Once all the data is moved to the Exos, I'll be long-formatting the old drives to ensure they're still good. How can I eliminate the previous pool without affecting the files on the three drives? Do I just remove them one-by-one, presumably in archive mode, until they've all been processed? And is there anything else I should do afterwards, like taking ownership of the old pool files and/or resetting permissions? Thanks in advance!

Rossmann said they couldn't do anything with the drive, which REALLY surprised me, so they referred me to Gillware Data Recovery. I need to talk to them first before sending the drive in to make sure the attempt will be a reasonable sum, which I'll try to do tomorrow. I guess the moral of the story is not to futz around with diskpart unless you know for damn sure you know what you're doing. I received the Terramaster. It looks like a typical grey internal drive cage, just a little wider and without any mounting points. It uses screw-in drive sleds, unlike the Sabrent, which is a PITA, but c'est la vie. However, it also came with some paper-like inserts that go in-between the drives and the bottom of the sleds, which I've never seen. The boxed instructions don't say why they're required and the online product guide doesn't even mention them, so I can only guess their purpose (electrical insulators?). Bizarre. It also doesn't have an internal PSU as such, but came with a laptop-style 12V barrel plug brick power converter. Unlike the Sabrent, the drives sit vertically, which makes me a bit uncomfortable (I might lay it on its side). There is only one USB-C connector. There has been some talk on the Terramaster forums about people needing a powered USB hub with this unit. I don't know why this would be required when directly attached to the USB-C port on a motherboard, but maybe that's been my problem all along. If so, I'll consider slitting my wrists later. I'm in the process of long-formatting three 18 TB Seagate Exos simultaneously. If that passes, I'll continue trying to rebuild the pool. This is my last attempt at doing so. If the formats fail, I'm giving-up, at least for awhile. Maybe in the far-flung future I'll get a proper tower with a 10,000 watt PSU and stuff it with drives, but I really, REALLY hope the Terramaster comes through. I have confirmed that Windows recognizes all six drives, but the Sabrent did the same until I started encountering those drive dropouts, so longevity will determine the winner. More to come!

I haven't heard from Rossmann yet. If I don't get a reply by Wednesday, I'll voice call them. I did order the 6-bay Terramaster, which should be here tomorrow. If/when I'm satisfied it's running as advertised, I'll rebuild the pool and copy over what I can. Assuming everything goes smoothly (har har), I'll reinstall everything and restore from config backups, which I've been holding-off on doing until I can figure things out. I really, REALLY hope the Terramaster "just works". Since it only accepts six drives, the power demand should be a lot less than the Sabrent. I'd still like to disassemble the Sabrent to see what sort of PSU it's using. I'm 99.9% sure it's something custom, but you never know until you actually eyeball things. I'll report back in a few days. Wish me luck.

I think I'm gonna give up on having a pool. Maybe a computer. I was trying to clear that 18 TB Exos out using diskpart. This Exos has the label of ST1800NM. Another 20 GB Exos that I had bought a few months ago has the label ST2000NM. I was tired, bleary-eyed, more than a little frustrated with all these problems, wasn't thinking 100% straight, and selected the ST2000NM in diskpart, and cleaned it. Problem is this drive had gigabytes of data that was critical to the pool. GIGABYTES. I still can't believe I made such a simple, rookie, and yet devastating mistake. My God. I don't know if any of the file table can be salvaged, as I just did a simple "clean" and not a "clean all", but I've got a recovery request into Rossmann Repair Group to see if they can do anything with it. I know there are some tools in the wild that I could probably run myself on the drive, but I don't trust myself to do much of anything atm. I should never have thrown money at an AM5 system. I also probably should've stayed away from the Sabrent and anything like it. Instead, I should've done what any sane person would've done and assembled a proven AM4 or Intel platform in a full tower and attached the drives directly to the motherboard. Yeah, the cable management would've been a nightmare, but literally anything would be better than this. My goal of staving-off obsolescence as much as possible has instead kicked me in the teeth while I was already lying prone in a ditch. If, by some miracle, Rossmann is able to recover the data, I'm going to take a long and hard look at my PC building strategy. Hell, maybe I'll throw money at a prebuilt or one of those cute HDMI-enabled NUCs that're all the rage. I just know that I'm exhausted and am done with all of this, at least for the time being.

I went into the power settings and disabled USB selective suspend. I also made sure the system wouldn't turn off any disks. I just did this, so it'll take a little time to see if it had any results. I actually had no idea the Sabrent had flashable firmware. I downloaded and applied the one linked in that thread. Again, I just did this a few hours ago, so results (if any) may take a day or two to manifest. Thanks for the link! However, after flashing, I did try to do another chkdsk /b on the Exos, but it did the same thing and got jammed at 5%. I'm doing a "clean all" on it now, but if I'm reading things right, that'll take awhile, so I'll leave it overnight. I'm beginning to think the PSU for the Sabrent might be underpowered, as others in that forum also complained about disk drops, especially when it came to SSDs. I have all 10 bays populated with various Seagate and WD spinners, which could be causing issues. If the flash and power settings don't improve things, I'm thinking of ditching it for a 6-bay Terramaster: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BZHSK29B/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A307CH216CTGMP&psc=1 I don't like the fact that the Terra seems to use old-school drive sleds, but I'll gladly accept that hassle if it means I can get the pool back to 100% (I can settle for only six disks in the meantime). I might even take apart the Sabrent to see if the PSU can be upgraded (probably not, but it's worth looking into). More to come!

I've resisted saying this, but I think there's a problem with the Sabrent. Which, if true, really screws me. I'm beginning to suspect the Sabrent because I tried long formatting a brand-new 18 TB Exos and it also failed. I started the process in disk management, made sure that the percentage was iterating, and went to bed. Got up and nothing was happening and the disk was still showing "raw". So, at some point, the format failed without even generating an error message. I'll also periodically wake up to a disk or two having randomly dropped-out of the pool. I'll reboot the machine and those same disks will magically (re)appear. I'm currently doing a chkdsk /b on the new Exos after doing a quick format in order to assign it a drive letter (which worked). It started-out fine, but is now running at less than a snail's pace, with chkdsk reporting that it won't complete for another 125 hours. Scratch that, now chkdsk is saying 130 hours and it has stubbornly stayed at 5% for the past two hours. I do have another machine I can try long formats on and will do so, but I'm not sure what that'll prove at this point. I've also tried consulting Event Viewer, but so much data gets dumped into it that I can't really pinpoint anything (maybe that's just me being an idiot). I was really, REALLY relying on something like the Sabrent since it seemed to be a Jack-of-all-trades solution to having a bunch a disks without resorting to a server-style case or expensive NAS. If anyone has any suggestions as to a similar device, I'd love to hear it.

What do you guys think about a drive that fails a long format (for unknown reasons), but passes all of Scanner's tests, isn't throwing out SMART errors, and comes up fine when running chkdsk?