WD20EARS-00S8B1 Strange SMART Behavior

[acrufox]

I have a WD20EARS-00S8B1 for just under a year and recently it has started showing some odd behavior. I ran chkdsk /r on the drive and 3/4 of the way through chkdsk it said it replaced bad clusters in file *.* After chkdsk completed I located the file referred to in chkdsk and it turned out to be a rar archive. I opened the rar and tried to extract the contents and winrar threw up a crc fail warning on the archive.

At this point I decided to load up crystaldiskinfo, and the drive in question was highlighted as caution.  Current pending sectors was at 8 and uncorrectable sector count was at 5 however reallocated sector was 0. I backed up the contents of the drive to another system and booted up dlgdiag and did an extended test. After many hours the utility completed, reported errors and wanted to perform a repair operation and completed with code 0223. I went back into windows 7 and crystaldiskinfo reported the drive as good and both pending and uncorrectable was 0, however reallocated sectors was still a zero value as well.

I proceeded to long format the drive and copy the contents back to the drive. Several hours later I came back to smart again reporting both pending and uncorrectable sectors values of 3 each, as well as a new value of 5 under write error rate. 

So again back to dlgdiag. This time I zero wrote the drive which said it successfully completed, but on the extended test it again said errors were found and if I wanted to repair and again 0223 code.  I booted up to windows and the write error rate was back down to zero, and uncorrectable sectors is also zero, but now I have 1 pending sector again. Reallocated sectors count still reports a value of zero.

How does one proceed in this kind of situation? A file stored on the drive actually ended up being damaged but dlgdiag just seems to mark these sectors in question back to good status only to show up again in pending/uncorrectable sectors only a few hours later. I would be happy if the drive would reallocate these sectors, but going by smart status it is not doing that.

Can the drive be RMA’d under this situation? If I let the drive idle for a few days both pending and uncorrectable sectors slowly climbs back up again. So far every extended test I’ve run to date completes with error code 0223.

Thanks!

[moon1]

Hi, for starters, error 0223 is, 

223

Errors Repaired

Errors found, but have been repaired successfully. There were media errors that were within the repair capabilities of diagnostic utility. The drive should now be defect free.

Test complete Defect Fre

that you can find it in Link:  http://support.wdc.com/techinfo/general/errorcodes.asp?lang=en#v10

and going back to you error, they way i see it, you could try the hdd in another system to see if the behavior appears again, if the error appear again, i would recomend that you RMA it

[acrufox]

Well I tried that and formatted the drive and ran chkdsk on the drive on a 2nd system. Smart status was reporting zero after the last time I ran dlgdiag in the other system, 3/4 of the way through chkdsk /r current pending sector count went back up to 2 again. Read error rate went from 112 to 114.  Is there any way to force the drive to reallocate spare sectors? I tried filling the drive once on one attempt but then those sectors came back as good again.

My only concern is how to RMA this when I fill out the RMA.What would I put?  Dlgdiag keeps returning with error code 0223 no matter how many times its run it finds errors to correct? When I had a WD die to read element failure and then too many bad sectors and a smart error, it made it easy to RMA that drive.

I don’t really trust the drive because I already lost one file to it, and the drive seems unwilling to set the problem sectors aside.

Thanks

[moon1]

Another idea, would be to run the DLG from the cd-rom, that way you will write 0 to the drive independently from the OS.

[acrufox]

Would that be the same as booting off a pen drive with dos? That is how I’ve been running dlgdiag to date.

[acrufox]

Can this be used to RMA the drive?

http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/1498/hdderror.png

Dlgdiag extended tests take 6+ hours and always come back asking me to repair errors and code 0223.

[moon1]

the way i see it, you can replace it, because it has bad sectors, and its not able to be fixed by the DLG or anyother app

[acrufox]

I guess I’ll have to. Just not quite sure what to fill in the details field for RMA. I’ve done RMAs before, but its always been a definitive error code or read failure.

This drive is the first drive I’ve ever encountered where dlgdiag just reports errors and fixes them only to say/do the same thing again next time I run it. I guess that is as good an explanation as any?

Thanks

[moon1]

yes, sir, you can fill the rma with that info

[acrufox]

Thanks for all the help, I appreciate it!

[moon1]

any time;)

[acrufox]

Interesting. Did an advanced RMA soon after and just received a WD20EARS drive back. =)

Is western digital changing their labeling? There is no longer any green in the top or bottom of the sticker like my other green drives. Model matches my other green drives of WD20EARS-00MVWB0.