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Significance of bad sector trend in old drive?


Nerva

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So, I've had a home server for over 10 years, and over the years what used to be six 1TB and four 2TB drives have steadily failed until I now have only three of each, but I have of course added newer, larger drives that now store the bulk of my data.

 

The older, smaller drives of course use more watts/TB and take up SATA slots, but small drives still have their niche uses.   I decided some months ago to take the remaining three 2TB drives, which had been used for long-term storage of "stuff I want to keep" and repurpose them for SageTV DVR storage -- using two of the drives in parallel for redundancy, and pulling the third drive out of the server to keep in reserve as a spare, so that I can expect to have a redundant 2TB DVR system for years to come.

 

But since the reshuffle, one of the 2TB drives has steadily reported bad sectors in Stablebit Scanner.   It probably had less than a dozen bad sectors when I switched it from archive duty to DVR, but now it has over 100 -- I eventually started logging the trend:

 

Date            #BS

2016-10-25 32

2016-10-29 37
2016-11-01 40
2016-11-03 43
2016-11-06 45
2016-11-08 47
2016-11-09 48
2016-11-14 57
2016-11-17 69
2016-11-20 72
2016-11-21 80
2016-11-24 84
2016-11-25 98
2016-11-28 101
2016-11-30 114
 
So, it is typically about 1 new bad sector per day, but occasionally there are bigger jumps.
 
The other 2TB drive has 58 bad sectors, but it already had around 55 when I switched it over to being a DVR drive.   At first I thought the other drive was just "catching up", but now it has blown past its brother and has twice the bad sectors.
 
I'm wondering what the significance really is of this trend in bad sectors, and if anyone wants to speculate on what the underlying cause is?
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Hi

 

bad sectors do get remapped up to a limit (spare sectors on the disk put there by maker) - consequences are very slow performance

 

By putting them in raid1 you have significantly upped their stress level and as such the have or are about to tune their toes up

 

so very soon you are going to get - if not already - unrecoverable errors - write/read errors - corrupt recordings etc

 

i have a couple of drives with a 1 or 2 bad sectors - they had them in the first few days of use several years ago and have not go worse - any other drive that starts to show bad sectors is pulled and replaced asap

 

bad sectors only ever get worse the surface of the disk is degrading 

 

any trend of more bad sectors - both drives are dying - give them a good send off and recycle - then buy a newer sexier model 

 

i just hope you have not got corrupted data while they were in use

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Well, I guess it is a good thing I am using the drives for DVR -- that's the least-critical data on my server -- it is why I use my oldest drives for today's rerun of Seinfeld and the local news report.

 

The problem is the DVR workload, not the use of pool duplication.   I record up to 200 GB of shows every day on a 2TB disk that is extremely fragmented, and obviously the 2TB drives are not handling it well.   Basically it is a write many times, read occasionally application.

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I guess I might as well run the drive until it dies.   In the past, with my main archive pool, when one of the drives goes offline, the whole pool becomes read-only -- but is that still the case if there is full redundancy?   If the bad drive fails and the DVR pool becomes read-only, then I won't be able to record shows until I remove the bad drive from the pool.

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I guess I might as well run the drive until it dies.   In the past, with my main archive pool, when one of the drives goes offline, the whole pool becomes read-only -- but is that still the case if there is full redundancy?   If the bad drive fails and the DVR pool becomes read-only, then I won't be able to record shows until I remove the bad drive from the pool.

 

Aye, correct.

 

However, if you have StableBit Scanner installed as well, and enable the evacuation on SMART errors, as well... it should warn you and clear out the drive.   Then you can quickly remove the problem drive.

 

And if you start seeing SMART errors, replace the drive. Check to see if it's under warranty.  The Advanced Replacement option sends the drive first. Great for this sort of issue. 

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