A year ago I bought 6 of these drives for a new system I was building. When I installed them I found one was Dead On Arrival. Fortunately the store I purchased the drives from replaced the dead one right away.
I installed the drives in a RAID 5 configuration with 5 active drives and one cold standby. Everything seemed to run fine initially.
A few weeks ago my system performance was really slow and there seemed to be a lot of disk activity so I installed the Intel RAID management software which confirmed one of the drives (SATA 5) had failed and was being rebuilt. After many hours I noticed that the rebuild was not really progressing, it just could not get past 5% completed. I also noticed that the drive had 254 unrecoverable medium errors.
I powered down my system and replaced the failed disk with the cold standby and powered up my system. The RAID controller automatically started rebuilding the new drive. Initially the drive started off with no media errors, but eventually it started reporting unrecoverable medium errors too. It took over a week for the rebuild to complete, but shortly after it was over 90% complete the entire rebuild failed with “bad-block table full” and there were 254 media errors like the previous drive.
So I went and bought a brand new WD2002FYPS, installed it, and waited for the rebuild to complete. A week later this new drive failed in pretty much the same manner as the previous one with “bad-block table full” and 254 recorded unrecoverable medium errors.
I downloaded and installed the WD Life Guard Diagnostics for Windows and ran the Quick test on the first failed drive. The results were:
Quick Test on Drive 2 did not complete! Status code = 07 (failed read test element, failure checkpoint = 97 (unknown test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 2!
I’ve started running the Extended Test on the drive but there is an estimated 5 hours to go before completion.
What are the chances I could have 3 drives fail like this in almost exactly the same way? All three were connected to the same SATA port on my motherboard. Could it be a faulty SATA cable or connection? It seems strange that the rebuild gets to 90% completed and then fails completely.
the remaining 4 disks on my system seem to be running fine without any medium errors. Unfortunately it’s rather scary to be running a degraded RAID 5 system like this for so long as one more disk failure will corrupt the entire array.
Has anyone else run into problems with this particular model/line of disk drives?
Cheers, Eric