If it were my drive, I wouldn’t be concerned at all. Assuming that the error is indeed a firmware bug, then it appears to be benign. Its only undesirable consequence seems to be clutter in the error log.
In fact here is a recent thread where the error log appears to have recorded another bug, but this time the bug is in WD’s diagnostic software rather the firmware:
The abovementioned thread illustrates that not all entries in the log are the fault of the drive. In that particular case the drive aborted an illegal command. Ironically it was WD’s own Vendor Specific Command (VSC), not a standard ATA command, that caused the error.
As for the Spin Up Time SMART attribute, I have noticed that some SMART attributes take a while to settle down. This is to be expected for those attributes whose values reflect a rolling average or lifetime average. In these cases the drive needs to record a certain amount of activity before the SMART data can be considered to be statistically significant.
For example, what can you say about a drive that records a seek error or read error on its very first seek or read? In Seagate’s case, a drive needs to record 1 million seeks before its Seek Error Rate attribute settles down. It begins with a normalised value of 100 and then immediately drops to 60 when the target is reached. Although this counterintuitive behaviour might ring alarm bells, the data actually reflect a perfect score. I haven’t examined WD’s attributes to the same extent, but I would expect that all is not as it would appear.
Here is another thread where I have collated Spin Up Time data for a WD drive:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-Portable-Drives/WD1002FAEX-Rumble-noise/m-p/535979#M12200
Assuming that the raw value of the Spin Up Time attribute represents the time in milliseconds, then ISTM that a normalised value of 200 corresponds to 3.00 seconds, and each point corresponds to 50ms. That is, a drive that spins up in 4.00 sec would lose 20 points (180 = 200 - 20).
Your data do not appear to corroborate my findings, but then the difference between current and worst values is quite large, so maybe the data are still settling down.
Spin_Up_Time - 219 178 021 - 4016
