unreadable sectors on 3TB disk

[scasplte2]

Hi,

I purchased a WD 3TB red drive today and as soon as I booted up my WHS 2011 server stablebit scanner reported there was about 5,500 sectors unreadable (~3MB). Can anyone tell me if this is normal on large drives or should I exchange this for a new one? Also, are unreadable sectors any indication of the future stability of the drive? I am not in the market for performance but rather reliability and availability of the media stored on my WHS.

 

I'd also be interested in reading any articles anyone may know of concerning long term drive health in WHS or JBOD systems.

 

Thank you,

Jim

[Christopher (Drashna)]

I wouldn't say that's normal. I'd say that it's a manufacturing defect with the drive.

 

I have a bunch of 3TB drives (all seagate though), and I've not seen this before, nor heard of someone getting a new drive with that reported.

 

Though, is the disk GPT or MBR?

 

 

 

As for long term health, I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. 

The longer the drive is powered on and active, the shorter it's lifespan will be. But that's normal wear and tear. And if you're trying to compare to a RAID... drives would last longer in a "pool" or as a JBODs than in a RAID, which is constantly active and constantly writing to the pool.  With StableBit Scanner, it's possible to get the drives to idle/suspend while not in use. There is no such option with RAID. 

 

Another health factor is heat. Heat damages the drives and can significantly reduce the lifespan of a drive. That is why data centers are heavily air conditioned.  Scanner does monitor the temp of the drives and will warn you about that as well. And if you're using StableBit DrivePool, the Scanner balancer has an option to not use disks that have overheated, to help preserve the disk and, more importantly, your data.