On Saturday, 15 June 2019 21:19:17 BST Hamish MB wrote:
> I have been running badblock's read-only test on the other bad drive
> (currently in the NAS) today. There have been a total of 292 bad sectors
> thus far - I don't trust this drive not to randomly fail/degrade rapidly.
That's less than the one I have here, but still not good.
> If gsmartctl is right, the drive has been powered on for a total of
> around 7 years! Does this sound reasonable, Terry?
I just checked and yes it is probably right, Those discs were originally
bought when I purchased my Netgear Stora in October 2011. Being a NAS, the
Stora was never powered down so they would have continued non-stop until the
Stora was zapped by a lightning strike (it didn't' actually hit the Stora you
understand).
I then purchased the D-Link Sharecenter in September 2016 and transferred the
discs from the Stora. I retired the D-Link in February last year because the
D-Link support was poor (very few updates) and the discs were full anyway.
The replacement was a Netgear ReadyNAS with 2 TB discs, so no transfer needed.
So those discs would have run pretty much continuously from October 2011 to
Feb 2018 - getting on for 7 years anyway.
This raises the spectre of the age of the (so far) good drive. If it's as old
as the bad one, we may end up with the same problem quite soon.
> Either way, we could try rescuing these drives with the destructive (or
> non-destructive) read-write options for badblocks, but I think it
> probably makes more sense to get a new 1 TB drive. I doubt they're too
> expensive, seeing as 1TB isn't huge these days.
They start at around £25 for an unheard of brand on Amazon. Brands such as
Seagate or Western Digital start at around £35. The problem is, if the second
drive is aging too, we might need to replace both.
One solution is to populate the drive with two smaller drives; say 500 GB.
They start at around £20 each. I think that we need to discuss this at the
WMT before we go too far spending their money.
> This is especially a good idea, because any custom programs/software we
> build/compile for this may have to be on the HDDs - the NAND storage is
> tiny and writing to it probably means re-flashing it. There is a
> serial/debug port on the PCB to which we can solder pins to unbrick it
> if we have to, but this may be an avenue best avoided. Also, the NAND is
> only 128MB - probably not enough to add anything useful.
See above.
> As for how well it handles damaged drives, the RAID re-sync failed
> (without any error!) after I removed and reinserted the bad drive. The
> current state of the array is "degraded" - we probably need a good
> drive/to fix one of these before we use it.
See above. I think we may need at least one new drive if we are going to
continue with this idea.
--
Terry Coles
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