The Big WHS – Disaster Strikes, Part I

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At around 1:30AM I woke up to what I believed was the fire alarm. After about 30 seconds outside in the cold, I realized that it was not a fire alarm, but rather an Adaptec controller alarm. The first hard drive has failed.

In my haste to assemble the new hardware for burn-in last evening I did not install the Adaptec Storage Manager software so I was treated to a 1:35AM download and installation. After everything was setup, I saw something all too common, but never fun. One of the new Western Digital Green 1.5TB drives started throwing bad sectors and SMART errors just after the raid 6 build verify was complete. No data was on the array, however, it is at minimum, a minor inconvenience.

First new drive to fail. WD Green 1.5TB after 36 hours.

This highlights an important point, always burn-in new drives before trusting them with your valuable data! I am debating sending the drive back to the reseller or Western Digital, will decide tonight and send it back tomorrow.

As another form of update: the new WHS is installed. Now that RDC is available, it is making life much easier.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Great idea about burning in the drives – the question is – HOW?
    I have two WD greens in my current system, and did not burn them prior to dumping my data on them.
    But I did, however, keep a backup in my old drives – just in case.

    So – how do you burn in new drives?

    Thanks!

  2. I use a combination of multi TB writes, raid 6 array build and verify runs, and run secure erase on the drives. That combination seems to work fairly well these days.

  3. Patrick,
    do you have a script or batch for your multi writes, erases?

    Are you willing to present this here please?
    Thx
    Alex

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