Scanner reported drive as on the verge of failure, but now...nothing?

[fleggett1]

I'm running Windows 10 using the recently updated versions of Scanner and Drivepool.  About an hour ago, I got the dreaded gold shield in the tray stating that a drive was going bad and was predicted to completely fail within 24 hours.

Wonderful.  So, I open Scanner, look at the drive, and everything looks normal.  Not a single SMART value out of line.  No bad sectors reported.  Drive reports as healthy.

I'm confuzzled and a little weirded out.  What could cause this?  Is this drive really going bad or was it some transient issue that has since self-corrected?  I no longer see the shield icon, so there's that (at least).  Does Scanner keep a logfile around somewhere about these (presumably dire) events that has more information?

[fleggett1]

Well, I found some logs in \ProgramData\StableBit Scanner\Service\Logs and looked at all of them, but didn't see anything that indicated a drive was homiciding itself.  I used search terms like "predict", "heat", "failure", and "imminent", but no joy.

I also stumbled across the \ProgramData\StableBit Scanner\Service\ErrorReports directory, but all the files are encrypted, so that was a bust.

Can I chalk this up to poltergeists or some other spooky late Halloween shenanigans?  I looked at the drive again in Scanner and it reports green across the board.

[VapechiK]

On 1/4/2023 at 8:10 PM, fleggett1 said:

I'm running Windows 10 using the recently updated versions of Scanner and Drivepool.  About an hour ago, I got the dreaded gold shield in the tray stating that a drive was going bad and was predicted to completely fail within 24 hours.

Wonderful.  So, I open Scanner, look at the drive, and everything looks normal.  Not a single SMART value out of line.  No bad sectors reported.  Drive reports as healthy.

I'm confuzzled and a little weirded out.  What could cause this?  Is this drive really going bad or was it some transient issue that has since self-corrected?  I no longer see the shield icon, so there's that (at least).  Does Scanner keep a logfile around somewhere about these (presumably dire) events that has more information?

I haven't earned a gold shield yet lol... Scanner is almost through with all my disks on its 2nd monthly pass.

But HDSentinel gave me a scare recently. I have 2 x Mobius Pro 2C enclosures both set at RAID 1. In one of them the primary (top) disk threw a Threshold 165 for SMART #3 'spin up time.'  0% health failure predicted. I just let it run as the drive LED remained blue, while I rummaged thru warranty paperwork and made screenshots. Day and a half later the error just disappeared. Back to 100% health Threshold 24 just like the 5 other identical disks i have (HUH728080ALE601). Computer had been up at least 4 days before error occurred, and was days after error cleared before a reboot. The drive survived a few reboots since then and recently passed its first StableBit Scanner run (it is not part of my pool and had excluded it from my testing during trial period). During Scanner's surface test only the primary disk was read from/tested anyway so there's that 'lucky' quirk. I understand that Scanner works with just what the controller feeds it. HDSentinel sees both physical disks in the array so I could test the secondary disk with it, but I've been wanting to break those arrays for a while and I now have a good excuse. I will add it to DrivePool and mark it duplicated only.

So yeah, spooky deus ex machina type stuff goin' on lol... good to know I'm not the only one.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Likely, it was some SMART value that triggerd the issue, and then corrected itself.  This can happen, especially if problem sectors get written to (the drive can correct them, usually by remapping). 

If you haven't, set up email notifications (or set up mobile/text notifications in StableBit Cloud), and it should give you more details about any errors that occur.

[fleggett1]

I think I'm gonna call the tray icon from now on the "Gold Shield of Worry" (GSoW).  Kinda goes along with Blue Screen of Death and Red Ring of Death, only with less Death.

Thanks, Christopher, for the likely answer.  Still hasn't occurred again (thank God).  I've already lost a bunch of drives over 2022 and didn't need this on the very first damn week of 2023.

VapechiK, it's good to share misery, even if it is, y'know, misery.  I'm actually on the verge of swapping-out my entire system, as I suspect my creaky Norco has been slow-roasting my drives for the better part of five years.  Then again, I did modify it to support an AIO and probably blocked some critical airflow in the process.

Never let me borrow a dremel.

[fleggett1]

Well, it just happened again and disappeared just as quick.  Arrggh.  I guess I will have to setup email notifications after all.

Are these incidents logged ANYWHERE that's human readable?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

They may/should be in the service logs ("C:\ProgamData\StableBitScanner")