More with the NAS

Bad Sectors on Hard Drive
Bad Sectors on Hard Drive

Back in April, I posted about coming home to a beeping NAS.  Well, it happened again.  To the very same drive, I installed in April of this year!  That’s right.  See the graph above from my Synology OS showing the increasing number of bad sectors on the HD over 7 months.  I replaced the WD Gold 4TB drive with a Red 4TB 7200RPM drive.  Hopefully, it will fair better.  I also turned on a weekly in-depth test that will email me if anything really bad comes up again.

While researching for this issue I noticed a lot of confusion in forums and on discussion boards stating that you manufacturers like Western Digitial will not take back a drive that has “a few” bad sectors.  I don’t believe this is true.  I have returned drives in the past for this same issue, just bad sectors.  This drive had 26 which I consider being a lot of bad sectors.  When plugged into my iMac it would not initialize at all.

If you are not sure about sending a drive in for RMA, I encourage you to at least try it.  Worst case scenario, they send the drive back to you.  You only lost a bit of shipping costs, still cheaper than a new HD.

Also, use common sense when looking at the numbers.  My NAS said 26 bad sectors was fine, but I knew better.  Don’t believe the system, after all the defaults for the number of bad sectors may be set to null or to 100.

HD Health 100%
HD Health 100% ????

NAS Woes

We just got back from vacation and after turning back on NAS I get beeps!  Not what you want to hear when powering on after a week of having the server off.

So new hard drive is ordered and I’m $200 dollars poorer, but all my digital files will be a little safer in a few days.  Disk 1 is the drive that went out and it was the first one installed of course so, makes sense I guess.  The best part is because of RAID 5 nothing was lost and the system continues to run.

With Prime from Amazon, It will be back up Monday night.  I’m currently doing a secure erase on the bad drive.  Then I’ll take it out and dust the whole enclosure while throwing out the old drive.  #ITdad