Toshiba T300 / HDWD240 - 4 TB SMR

[BluezNL]

I'm still experimenting a bit with Drivescanner and Drivepool, and I do have some flaky drives in my stack. (I'm perfectly aware they are flaky, but I decided it would offer a good test case that way 🙂 I have my drive scanning parameters set to a much higher frequency than usual, just to keep track of things.)

One of my drives is a barely used Toshiba drive, which I accidentally bought, not realizing it was an SMR. It did its job in another PC for a blue monday, just serving some games, but it was molassus slow when doing some serious writing so I took it out and put it on the shelf for a year or so. Note that it is sold under different names, and that (according to DriveScanner) it doesn't even support TRIM (and that's reasonably bad for an SMR drive, I guess).

Anyway, it's a shitty drive. But here's the question: today it was kicked out of the pool after DriveScanner marked a section of about 10% in the middle as unreadable (red blocks). However, the Smart parameters were not updated (no increase in read errors) and when checking the drive with HDD Sentinel Pro, that software doesn't report those sectors as unreadable.

Note 1: none of the other drives has suffered from this thus far. Note 2: I'm running five drives on the mainboard SATA, six drives on a PCIe SATA card (I know, I know).

I'm planning to throw out that drive anyway (and put an 8 TB Red Pro in there instead tomorrow, as well as replace the power supply with a fresher, larger unit) but I was wondering what could be the cause.

- A controller (port) that failed and then came back spontaneously?
- A crappy drive that decided to do some internal clean up, confusing DriveScanner?
- Something else?

Any suggestions? Anybody else using that same drive in a pool? (It's a lemon, but hey, somebody else might have made the same mistake.)

[Shane]

I suppose I can't rule out a haunted port, but I'd still place my monopoly money on door number two (drive belatedly self-corrected). Wondering, if you clear the blocks and rescan it does Scanner still find the same damage?