Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[johnyfalco]

I have a ST31500341AS 1.5Tb hard drive that is one of six identical drives I have in my ReadyNAS Pro. When I install this in the ReadyNAS Pro (in slot 6)  it eventually comes up as a " Drive Fail" error.

If I remove it from the NAS, reformat it to NTFS and install it in my PC it works 100% as it should, I can read and write to it.

I have borrowed another HD to install in the NAS, in the same slot 6, and that also works 100% as it should. So it appears its not a NAS problem.

Does anybody have any suggestions on how I can get this particular Hard Drive to work in my NAS

All six drives are ST31500341AS with  CC1H firmware, purchased at different times over a period of six months. The problematic drive was purchased May 2009

The NAS firmware is the very latest and the ST31500341AS is on the list of compatible drives for the ReadyNAS Pro

[fzabkar]

johnyfalco, you wrote: "If I remove it from the NAS, reformat it to NTFS and install it in my PC it works 100% as it should, I can read and write to it."

I suspect that, whilst it was in the NAS, the drive had developed some uncorrectable sectors. When you formatted the drive, the OS would have written new data to the bad sectors. The drive's CPU would then have retired the bad sectors and transparently replaced them with good spares.

Here are a few SMART diagnostic and benchmarking tools. In particular, look at the reallocated sector count.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows/Linux):

http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HD Tune:

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

CrystalDiskMark:

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html

smartmontools (Linux/Windows):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/files/

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/Download

See this article for SMART info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

Comparison of S.M.A.R.T. tools:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_S.M.A.R.T._tools

List of SMART tools:

http://smartlinux.sourceforge.net/smart/dload.php

[johnyfalco]

Thanks for the reply but after I have reformatted the failed drive in the PC, I have reinstalled it in the NAS and it still comes up failed disk.

If I go to the ReadyNAS  "frontview" software I can read all the smart information off the "failed" driv, and its showing no reallocated sectors.

[fzabkar]

Please excuse my ignorance, but does your ReadyNAS box contain a proprietary RAID, or is it a JBOD?

Do you need to prepare (partition, format) a drive beforehand, or does your ReadyNAS do that for you?

Can we see the full SMART report?

[johnyfalco]

Yes it is a proprietary RAID. Its called XRAID2

The NAS formats the drive, so need to do that.

I have tried cutting & pasting the smart report but for some reason it thinks its over 20,000 characters and wont let me do it

[johnyfalco]

SMART info here  http://tinyurl.com/ycugujo

[fzabkar]

Your SMART report is missing several attributes, probably because the author of the software didn't understand them. Unfortunately the author insists on interpreting the actual data rather than displaying them.

The missing attributes are Raw Read Error Rate, Seek Error Rate, Hardware ECC Recovered, and 4 "unknown" attributes.

Here is an example of a full SMART report for your model (HD Tune):

http://www.msfn.org/board/reallocated-sector-count-increasing-seagate-st31500341as-t128891.html

Unfortunately HD Tune's author truncates the raw attribute values to 32 bits. HD Sentinel will show all 48 bits.

I'm wondering whether one of the missing attributes has dropped below its threshold.

[johnyfalco]

Thanks for your input to try and resolve this problem.

Here is the SMART information from HD Tune:

http://tinyurl.com/yfw92gp

[fzabkar]

Sorry, I'm out of ideas. Everything looks OK to me.

The high raw value for the Seek Error Rate is telling you that there have been no errors in 2.6 million seeks.

The raw Read Error Rate is a sector count, not an error count. It is OK, too.

The following URLs explain the SMART attributes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk.M.A.R.T.#Seagate_raw_Seek_Error_Rate_attribute

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk.M.A.R.T.#Raw_Read_Error_Rate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

Maybe you could use SeaTools to zero-fill your drive ???