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| About this blog: Computers hate me. They really do. Every time I try to do something unusual like add new hardware, something is guaranteed to go wrong. I decided to start writing about my constant problems so that someone else might benefit from my experiences - or at least laugh at them! |
I seem to be jinxed this month - yet another WD drive has failed. This is the third failure in 3 weeks and brings the WD total to 5.
This time it's actually the replacement for the second-last failure, in other words a brand new drive. It's been powered on for less than a week.
This drive "disappeared" (similar to the last failure) at 10am this morning, then when rebuilding the RAID array smartmontools detected the drive had an unrecoverable sector. By itself, a single unrecoverable sector is not necessarily something to worry about, but since the self test clearly fails I'll be returning it.
Incidentally, I didn't do my usual round of tests since this drive was required sooner than expected; it's possible this bad sector was there even before it was installed. Unfortunately the drive that I've used to replace it has also not had any infant mortality testing, since I only received it a few days ago.
At this point I'm having trouble believing that 5 failed drives out of ~20 installed Western Digital drives is an acceptable, or normal, failure rate. Assuming it's not just a bad batch (which is unlikely, since they were purchased at different times) it can only be...
- Physical mishandling somewhere in the distribution chain
- Physical mishandling at retail outlet (they are OEM drives in anti-static bags - no other packaging...)
- UPS
- Power supply
- Vibration (the case has 8 hard drives)
All of these are common failure points since all of the failed WD drives were purchased from the same retailer, and they're installed into the same machine; diagnosing and fixing this issue will be incredibly difficult.
I'm going to pull some more hair out now........
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UPDATE: I believe these HD glitches may have been caused by a faulty "Y" SATA power adapter, which is a single 4 pin molex connector to 2 SATA power connectors. Both the WD 750GB and VelociRaptor "disappeared" together each time, and I suddenly realised why - they were both hanging off the same Y cable. I've replaced the power supply with a model that has 8 SATA power connectors (rather than 6) so all drives are now connected directly to the PSU wiring loom. No problems since. I don't think I'll return these two most recent "failures" as it's likely the power glitch was the cause of the reported bad sector, rather than a HD problem. A zero fill fixed the read failure status, although offline uncorrectable is still showing as 1... smartd reminds me of this every half hour. :)
So I guess we'll disregard the last two failures... which leaves us with 3 "real" WD failures.
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Related posts:
Another HD failure
WD RE3 failure after 175 hours powered on
A complete list of all recent hard drive failures in the office
Second WD failure
Velociraptor HD failed...
First WD failure
HD burn-in
4th WD drive failure
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