Finally a good example of a long lasting SATA drive

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on May 20th 2015 - Listed in Hardware Linux

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Two years ago I wrote a post (Seagate ST3000DM001-9YN166: A catastrophic disk) about massive failings of a Seagate hard drive model. One of them didn't even last 4 months and already failed.

Now to a good example. In March 2010 I ordered two Western Digital Caviar Blue (7200rpm, 500GB, SATA-II) and used them together as RAID-1 on a self-built NAS server.

Now, five years later, one of the two drives failed. After a runtime of about 40'000 hours. That's quite a good life time for a SATA hard drive being online 24/7!

Here's the smartctl output of the failing drive:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Caviar Blue Serial ATA family
Device Model:     WDC WD5000AAKS-00V1A0
Serial Number:    XXXXXXXXXXXXX
Firmware Version: 05.01D05
User Capacity:    500,107,862,016 bytes
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   8
ATA Standard is:  Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:    Wed May 20 15:25:40 2015 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

[...]

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   177   138   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       2150
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       88
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   151   151   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       391
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   045   045   000    Old_age   Always       -       40361
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       84
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       29
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       56
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   100   093   000    Old_age   Always       -       43
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       359
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       32916
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   199   194   000    Old_age   Offline      -       151
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   200   197   000    Old_age   Offline      -       13

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Extended offline    Completed: read failure       90%     40174         919347518

As you can see, the drive first re-allocated defect sectors and has no spare sectors left anymore. Another 32k defect sectors are pending to be reallocated - well, that won't happen anymore ;-).

Thanks to the RAID-1 configured in the NAS, everything continues to work. However it is strange that mdadm didn't detect the drive as failed. Both disks seem to be active in /proc/mdstat. Might be because of the old and unpatched SLES11 from anno 2010 though.

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