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Periodic SMART info warning


saiyan

Question

I have been running StableBit Scanner for a few days and I noticed one of my hard drive (a WD WD20EARS 2TB) would trigger SMART info warning periodically.

 

When such warning is triggered, the SMART info dialog would show a red "X" mark for "Reallocated Sector Count" and a yellow "!" for "Reallocated Event Count".

(Please see the attached image for example).

 

However, if I open CrystalDiskInfo to view the SMART attribute info for the same hard drive, both "Reallocated Sector Count" and "Reallocated Event Count" have raw values of ZERO.

 

After a few minutes the SMART warning in StableBit Scanner would go away and the SMART info dialog shows only "Read Error Rate" and "Reallocated Sector Count" with green check next to both items.

 

CrystalDiskInfo has never shown any caution or warning status for my WD20EARS 2TB hard drive.

All attributes related to "reallocated sector" all have raw value of zero so I'm confused why StableBit scanner would periodically show warnings related to "reallocated sector".

 

 

Does anyone know if this is a false warning displayed by Stable Scanner?

 

Thanks.

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That is very odd.

 

On scanner, see the "submit to bitflock" checkbox? Could you do that and report the BitFlock ID

 

And could you grab the error reports from scanner?

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_Scanner_for_Windows_Error_Reports

And a dump of the service, just incase?

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_Scanner_Freeze

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Hi.

 

I have already clicked on "Submit to BitFlock" once when on the SMART warning window.

 

I checked "C:\ProgramData\StableBit Scanner\Service\ErrorReports" directory and there are no files there.

 

As for a memory dump of Scanner service, should I do that when the SMART warning is triggered?

 

Thanks.

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Okay, I'm not surprised that the ErrorReports directory is empty. Those only tend to get created when the service crashes or experiences a critical error.

 

But yes, the next time the "error" comes up, grab a memory dump of scanner.  Both the "Scanner.Service.exe"  and the UI ("Scanner.UI.exe", if this is the windows version, which it looks like)

Those may be larger, so you'd want to use the Box.com upload widgets on the linked page above.

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Saiyan,

 

Based on your StableBit Scanner screen, the problem is not the RAW value, but rather that the value has dropped below the threshold on a pre-fail type attribute.

 

But that screen just looks wrong. WD Green Drives should be publishing a lot more SMART attributes. So yes, it could be a false positive. But then again I do see 16 reallocation even counts.
 

Can you please PM me your BitFlock submission ID at the bottom of the SMART Window so that I could take a look at the raw data? Also, we can set up a remote support appointment if you'd like and I'll log in and take a look at what's going on there.

 

Thanks,

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Hi Alex,

 

I am not going to worry about this WD green drive anymore because I have swapped it out for an old Hitachi drive a few days ago.

 

FYI.  This WD green hard drive I was using is a 2TB WD20EARS.

 

It's the very first generation of WD green drives.

I bought 6 of these a few years ago primarily because they were inexpensive and I needed new hard drives for various servers I was testing (web server, SQL sever, etc).

Three of these WD green drives died within six months and their RMA replacements also died within a year..

 

The three remaining hard drives have experienced various system freeze under heavy I/O when I was doing some web server and SQL testing.

Afterward, they all have some sort of re-allocation error related info recorded in their SMART attributes.

These drives will still freeze or slow down when put in heavy I/O environment.  They just suck.

 

I have not purchased another WD hard drives since then and I have been using these three green hard drives as temporary backup unit for none-important data.

 

When I rebuilt my media PC few months ago, I needed a old hard drive as a local storage unit for system image (drive C) backup but I didn't want to purchase another hard drive so I put one of these WD green drive in hoping that it will function well as a backup storage unit..   Although I picked the drive with the least amount of bad SMART attribute recorded, after installed StableBit scanner I realized this WD green drive is probably in worst shape then I thought false positive SMART warning or not.

 

Anyway.  Lesson i have learned is to never purchase another WD green drive again.  They cannot handle heavy I/O..

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I will second that observation. I had a couple 2TB WD Green's, and they basically had all the same issues you've described. It's why I always recommend against them. Reds are better, in fact. They're meant for NAS storage, but basically, they're just Green's with all of the issues fixed.

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FYI.  This WD green hard drive I was using is a 2TB WD20EARS.

 

Just speaking from personal experience here,

 

The EARS drives were very flaky and I would not hold that against WD because they were one of the first (if not the first) drives to implement 4K sectors. But I still have a couple of these chugging along with the Scanner keeping a close watch on them.

 

As Drashna said, the WD RED drives are a far better solution today.

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As Drashna said, the WD RED drives are a far better solution today.

That's based on a lot of feedback/troubleshooting. For those that aren't familiar with me, I'm a very active member of the Windows Home Server community, and those drives are pretty well hated just because of how problematic they are. 

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