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.
