Saturday 16 Mar 2024

Failed Backup Hard Drive

Image copyright

It's happened again, another failed hard drive. Proves why you should always have backups. In fairness, this hard drive is 10 years old, but even new drives can fail.

It's get down to it.

• DATE 24 Sept 2014
• Western Digital Green
• 3 TB
• WD30EZRX

This WD Green drive has survived 10 years but sadly passed yesterday, 15/03/2024. Originally came from a WD MyBook enclosure.

Here's my ZFS output with status about the pool. As you can see from CKSUM (checksum) section, there are 50 errors. Therefore, the pool is now in a "degraded" state.

Above is the current failed SMART data. As you can see, 12 current pending sectors is a bad indicator.

Above was the last "good" SMART report.

The drive worked happily for years with 2 reallocated sectors and 1177 read errors (this has not changed until yesterday). I previously has 2 read errors on ZFS but these were reallocacted sectors and worked well for another 2 years.

No redundancy as this is a backup pool to my main pool, which has a mirrored array. Pool also backed up to cloud and another external hard drive so no panic here. Due to being 10 years old no point clearing error and trying another scrub.

Here's the failed disk:

A year ago had 2 checksum errors, and 2 pending sectors. I wiped it and stated again and worked ok until now. I noticed it was taking longer to scrub which may have been an early indicator of pending failure.

Always backup: all drives will fail.