NAS problems

[Demon Cleaner]

One disk on my Synology 2413+ started with bad sector counts some time ago, and since 3 days it gives me I/O errors.

I get an health report every first day of the month, and since the 1.08.2014, disk 1 has 1 bad sector count.

Disk1:
Disk Reconnection Count 0
Bad Sector Count 1
Disk Re-identification Count 0

I thought that it might be not so bad, and it also stayed like this for a while. But in the health report of January this year, the bad sector count had increased to 50. One month later it was at 83, where it stalled until this day.

Unfortunately since last Saturday I also get I/O errors from that disk, and that once a day:

Dear user,

The hard disk 1 on Synology2413 had an I/O error, but it is working properly now after several retries. It might have been caused by bad sectors. If this error occurs again, please back up your data and run the S.M.A.R.T. test on your hard drive to examine the hard drive status.

Sincerely,
Synology DiskStation

S.M.A.R.T. test is normal and doesn't show anything unusual, status is green.

As the bad sectors get locked, and at the moment the count is not increasing, should I be worried? Do you think I should change the disk anyway?

You know that I'm running the NAS as one single volume in Raid 6 mode. Could I also use f.ex. a WD Red disk as replacement, as I'm using 12 x 4TB Hitachi Deskstar™ 5K4000 (HDS5C4040ALE630), which are not available anymore, does that matter?

Here's an excerpt of my log file:

[Harrison]

I would definitely swap the disk with a new one if possible as it is slowly signalling failure. I think as long as the replacement drive is the same size it should be fine and just rebuild the set and reintegrate the disk into the set. With RAID 6 if you take the disk out the NAS set should function OK until the new disk is ready.

How old is the drive? Most drives have 3-5 year warranties.

[Kin Hell]

Golden rule for ANY hard drive showing bad tracks or sectors is quite simple. Bin it & replace it asap.

What actually causes the bad sectors are bits of the ceramic platter/s coming away from the rest of the surface. These bits are always floating around inside the hard drive & are just waiting to start even more carnage. They get dragged across the platters during normal access procedures on the heads causing the continuous damage.

It really does not matter what mode the drive is configured in. Throw it in the bin or return it under warranty if applicable.

Also, S.M.A.R.T. isn't always as clever as it claims to be. It is a burden on your systems performance too, as it's always looking for problems. I never run S.M.A.R.T. on my systems as you'll know when something is wrong when trying to access the drive either on read or writes. Modern NAS boxes will give you an audible Beep, tho' S.M.A.R.T. isn't detrimental to NAS boxes like Windows based PC's are.

Reads might read okay but then you might have an issue when accessing the file/s just read. (usually corruption)
Writes will give you an instant I/O error every time.

Also on a personal note, I would not be running Hitachi Death Star Hard Drives in a NAS box & more so in a computer in any instance. They were good in the early days of low storage sizes: 20GB or < & went tits up when Maxtor came out with lower than 1" profile 40GB 3.5" HD's.

One good thing here is you're finally getting rid of one Death Star hard drive. They could be beyond their service limit & hopefully not available anymore. Hitachi Hard Drives are the worst hard drives you could ever run in a computer. They probably only did this well cos of the 5400rpm. The 7200's were nothing short of Nasty & their fail rate when in any RAID mode is alarmingly high from my personal experiences & close colleagues.

For your NAS box, pull them all & replace with WD Red immediately. Pro Red's are not necessary.

[Harrison]

Those drives were most likely actually manufactured my WD as they purchased the Hitachi 3.5" HDD business a long time ago, but have now since sold it on again to Toshiba, hence the reason the drives are no longer available.

For your NAS box, pull them all & replace with WD Red immediately

That would be very expensive for DC to do considering his NAS has 12x 4TB disks in it.

WD Reds are definitely the way to go though and I would recommend replacing them with them as they fail/start showing errors.

[Harrison]

Really. I would only want brand new drives in a nas.

[Demon Cleaner]

Well, a brand new one could be damaged too, already saw that many times, when f.ex. it's not well packed when they ship it. At least this one was running fine, so I know it's not broken. It has 15000 hours "only", with a lifespan of 1000000 hours, that's 1.5% of its life.

[Kin Hell]

Hard drives can have some funny hiccups @ all times of their service life. I perhaps consider myself lucky to have had 3 x 500GB Seagate Barracudas running in RAID0 for 5 years now....

I've had a brand new 2TB Barracuda spin up & Die whilst formatting..... the replacement lasted a week so I bought a 3TB WD Red instead & it's been fine since.

@ DC

Glad you got sorted in the end fella. Fingers crossed for you getting the old drive fixed under warranty. - Nice one!

[Demon Cleaner]

Got a reply from HGST. As they don't have these disks anymore, they proposed to send me a G-Drive external HDD as replacement. I agreed. Anyone knowing these ones? Amazon sells them for 164£.

http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive-usb

[Harrison]

I've not heard of them, but I like the case design. Could be handy for something like console backups?

Sent from my SM-T520 using Tapatalk

[Demon Cleaner]

I think I'm just gonna sell it straight away, as I don't need it.