All,
Sadly, my new WDC WD20EARX (2 months old max) appears to be failing (to me). I have a single EXT4 Linux partition with a whole bunch of movies for my Media Server…that appears to have some sort of DMA problem…below is my SMART report. Can anyone confirm that this drive is indeed Doomed???
Thanks,
Scott
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Analysing the test output is out of my league, but it does not look good.
However, do you have a PC which you can hook the Green drive up to, boot to Linux from a CD such as the Hirens BootCD, and rescue as much of your files as possible? I’d be thinking data recovery while it might still be doable.
Unfortunately that drive is toast.
Briefly, you have 1 reallocated sector, which means the drive has not been able to read data from that sector twice.
A single reallocated sector is enough to RMA a WD drive by the way.
You have a further 1347 sectors that cannot be read, and if you were to delete the data in them and then re-write some data back to those sectors they would most likely turn into reallocated sectors.
It’s not a DMA error, the data transmission was okay and it made it onto the disk, the problem is that the data can’t be read back now, and this is before it even tries to transmit it back to the SATA controller.
P.S. the head on your drive is parking approximately 20 times an hour. That green drive should be rated for 300,000 load/unload cycles, which puts it at 625 days before you’ve breached that rating.
Thanks Kieren,
That’s what I was afraid of!
I am in fact using ddrescue to attempt to recover individual files. I have gparted Magic as well, but figured I’d try the ddrescue first. Fortunately, I have another nearly empty 2TB drive to move the files to in the same machine.
I haven’t tried Hirens yet, but I’ll have a look!
Thanks for the feedback and tips.
Scott
Zatick,
Thankyou! As I said to Kieren, this is what I feared, but in anticipation, I’ve been ddrescue’ing as quickly as I can.
I’m doing what I can to recover the data, but will be RMA’ing the drive soon.
Very unusual, I’ve not had a drive (that wasn’t floating around a drawer for a couple of years between installations) fail on me in years. It took me almost a day to realize it was the drive and not the network causing my playback problems. Took only a few minutes with Apt-Get, SMARTctl and ddrescue to decide I was probably hosed, and a few seconds on the forums to confirm!
Again thanks! Off to RMA to see what I can see.
Scott
Hi scottgu3,
gparted Magic is what saved my bacon. At least, he default Linux boot on Hirens is centered around gparted. I wish you all the best in your efforts. I don’t think there will be any problem with the RMA, but good luck with the data recovery! I feel that I was very fortunate to salvage everything from my 3+ year old EARS drive.
Regards,
Kieren
Zatick,
The 625 day estimate may have been optimistic .
Sometime last night the thing imploded. I had given up on recovering data (taking too long), so I was rebuilding my movie collection from scratch (56 items in my Handbrake queue last night when I went to sleep), onto the other 2TB drive in the system. I decided to ignore the WD for now, and attempt to re-partition and format it before I sent it back to WD on RMA, and just left it connected and (foolishly) in the fstab.
Well…this morning, my media server once again lay on my office floor with it’s guts hanging out, as the drive failed (apparently disastrously), and in so doing (somehow) apparently caused enough errors on the SATA bus that my boot partition (on an SSD) hosed itself too. Now, the /root gets mounted RO, and I can’t remove the failed drive from the fstab, e2fsk tells me my superblocks aren’t so super any more…and so on…LOL.
I don’t think my Wife is going to be too keen on this whole media server idea if this sort of thing keeps happening .
Ho hummm…gparted magic here I come.
Nonetheless, you were correct, that drive IS toast!
Scott
Kieren,
See my recent reply to Zatick, the drive failed gloriously last night, and now gparted magic is the only thing that might save me from a total Ubuntu Server re-install!
The best part is I _could_ have taken it out yesterday before it failed, and all would be well! LOL.
Oh well, it’s not a hobby unless there is a healthy dose of frustration involved…right?
Later!
Scott
scottgu3 wrote:
[SNIP]
Oh well, it’s not a hobby unless there is a healthy dose of frustration involved…right?
Later!
Scott
Ain’t that the truth!
I guess it might be late for this, but my drive disaster was mitigated in part by sticking the drive in a ziplock freezer bag (quart size is ideal) and putting it in the freezer from an hour to overnight. I also took measures to keep it cold while copying from it. An anti-static bag inside the ziplock wouldn’t hurt, either.
Thanks Kieran,
To be honest, the data on the drive is simply not worth the pain of saving it. The tip may be useful in the future though.
I’m looking at a WD Red solution as a replacement…I’ll take the RMA drive and use it, then add a 3rd drive in the guise of an WD Red, then eventually replace the Green and the Seagate with two more Reds. Based on my reading, short of going to full on enterprise class drives, they should last a bit longer and be a bit more appropriate for a media server than the Green drive.
I’m not sure what my new backup plan is. I’m thinking I may just use some USB3 HD’s and back up the data periodically as I put it on the server. We’ll see.
Hey, at least I know what I’m doing for the rest of the week! LOL
Again, Thanks
Scott
It doesn’t sound like you had any redundancy, check out RAIDZ, or even better yet Freenas. I’ve got a Freenas server with 3x 5 disk RAIDZ5 volumes and can copy between those volumes at ~500MB/s. You don’t need a raid card, and RAIDz is really nice, self healing etc.
RAID isn’t a backup so I backup all of that data to a set of drives in my desktop in a Drivebender pool, although the Windows 8 pooling would probably do the job these days.
Have a look around google and see what other people are doing 
Those do sound interesting.I’ve got chasis that could do it. I’ll have to see if I have functional board and CPU.
Nope, no RAID yet, and really no backup. Until very recently, I had minimal data on the server, and I was considering my backup plan. (Cheap 1TB USB 3 External drives that I buy on Sale and store elsewhere seem appealing).
Right now, the server is a ASUS Mini-ITX MB running an Intel I3-2200 with support for 6 Drives (4 in RAID) on board, and the chassis has support for say 3 3.5"'s and an optical. I could probably squeeze 4 3.5’s in there and shoe-horn the SSD in someplace.
I’m running Ubuntu 13.04 Server, headless, usually with only access from my Desktop machine through SSH.
The box is running PlexMediaServer & SAMBA, and that’s about it.
Right now, it has a 2TB (that other brand) HD, and an older Patriot TORQX 128GB SSD (boot./root/swap). The WD 2TB GREEN was intended to be the Movie Drive, and the Other Brand was a backup drive. There were 200+ Movies on the WD when it fried, and I have backups of about 100 or so of them, as well as the original media.
Longer term, I was thinking of throwing a Freenas box on the network, and using this box as a backup server while migrating the movies to the Freenas.
But…budget wise, I’m going to have to wait on that…
Frankly, I think I was just unlucky with the WD. I am however going to invest in some Reds in the near term. Given what I use the system for, 7200 RPM desktop drives seem a bit silly.
I am going to have to do some reading on Drivebender…I’m not familiar with it. Sounds like a JBOD? Ah…I see. Sort of a JBOD mixed with a bit of Dropbox style magic. Interesting.
Also not in the budget right now, but worth a thought for the future.
Thanks for the tips! Good stuff.
Scott
Yeah, Drivebender is something like that. It’s just nice that you can stack odd sized drives and it presents them as a single volume. There are options to duplicate files (so 2 copies on 2 drives, auto repairing if a drive dies/is replaced), also records CRC32 info on each file so you know if there is corruption. Okay for a backup but I wouldn’t use it as primary storage…
But what caught my eye was the mention of the “support for 6 Drives (4 in RAID)”, try to stay away from intel ICH raid. You’ll probably be able to push 2-3 times more data through a RAIDZ and a RAIDZ gives you a bit more freedom in the event of motherboard/CPU failure (you just need a box with running freenas to mount your volume again). Plus you get the auto healing and all of the other benefits that go with it…
It looks like your current box would be fine for Freenas, although you typically just install Freenas on a USB flash drive (works fine). It doesn’t look like Plex Media is working that great in Freenas at the moment, but there are guys that have got it working.
Zatick,
Very good point. I didn’t know that about RAIDZ. I’ll do some reading on that too. I’ve always stayed away from RAID since a 90’s era disaster with a Promise RAID controller and a RAID 0 array… bad juju that. I’ve been recently considering it for two reasons…1. I’m a bit less ignorant than I was in the 90’s, and two things like freenas, and RAIDZ (and modern OS’s as well) have come a long long way since those days.
Lemme do some reading on RAIDZ and I’ll get back to you!
Scott
Zatick wrote:
But what caught my eye was the mention of the “support for 6 Drives (4 in RAID)”, try to stay away from intel ICH raid. You’ll probably be able to push 2-3 times more data through a RAIDZ and a RAIDZ gives you a bit more freedom in the event of motherboard/CPU failure (you just need a box with running freenas to mount your volume again). Plus you get the auto healing and all of the other benefits that go with it…
Hmmm…
Seems like I could simply add ZFS to Ubuntu Server, and then grab 3 2TB WD Red’s, and create a ZFS RAID-Z Pool with the the drives. It’s a bit expensive for 4 TB ~$300, but that’s a lot cheaper than losing my data… Might need to bump up my RAM too (1 GB / TB, and I’m only running 4GB now…so there wouldn’t be a lot of RAM for Plex).
– a little more reading reveals a bunch of Plex users doing this! –
Pretty cool stuff. Very interesting…of course now, I need to convince the significant other that 3 new WD Red’s are not just toys, but NEEDED! LOL
Thanks!
Scott
Adding ZFS to your existing server is another way to go
As far as memory goes, there are a couple of schools of thought on that. There is a lot of 1GB/1TB recommendations, but there are also people saying for lightly loaded media servers you get away with much less.
Good luck on getting permission for your drives! 
You should get away with mixing a desktop drive, WD green, and a new WD Red if it came down to it. I’ve got a bunch of green drives in my server and some “alternative” desktop models and have not had any problems with them, had one blip (pending sector) but drive did not drop. Freenas just emailed me and kept on running, didn’t miss a beat.
Woot! The Mrs must really like her Plex movies on the iPad. She just said “Go For It” on the 3 WD Reds.
Color me amazed.
Now I need to find a deal on them, and we’re good to go! I think I’m going to wait and see how it works with 4GB of RAM, but if I see a deal on that, I may grab a couple of 4GB Sticks to cover my butt on that part.
Again, thanks for all the tips. I really appreciate it.
Scott
haha :smileyvery-happy:
You’re welcome
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