Is Your Hard Drive DYING? - How to tell

[@EasyFixShaun]

Thanks man for all the help over the years! P.S. you should think about making some shorts from the highlights of all your old (and new) videos. You have already done all the work, leverage shorts for explosive growth. I think you are one of the very best 😃

[@josiahromoser]

@spacerex I love your videos man. Please keep up the solid work.

[@Letsgo1964forever]

So happy that I thought you have solved my degraded pool problem.... but in the latest version of Synology they have taken away the SMART attributes...... so I can't check the status of my disc..... Synology starts to look a lot like Apple....... 🤨

[@pietschreuder5047]

I put 4 2TB WD20EARS consumer harddisks in my Synology 411J in 2012. I later bought the 416play and migrated the disks to that drive. In al of the last eleven years, only once, one disk failed, but after formatting and rebuild of the RAID 5 set, it still works to this day. Never had a fault in my SMART reports! Granted, from migrating till setting up all of my security features on my Synology (backup scheme, file system, snapshots, user management) have been done after your excellent tips and examples. Even if all my disks crashes, i'm good! Thank you for that!

[@Uhle7719]

Great VIdeo! SMART Attribute is now removed, what are the options for now one? Thank You!

[@SpaceRexWill]

so they at least do now have most of these pulled out in the main page that you can use. If you hit the drive you, you can see the health data

[@ilona__willemsen]

Hello, At 8:04 you talk about the S.M.A.R.T Attribute details, but this button has been removed so you can't see the details anymore. Do you know a other way to get these details?

[@dungbeetle.]

Helpful and easy to understand, as usual, Will. Thank you. p.s. Do you have a video on how you should go about replacing a faulty drive on a Synology NAS?

[@GreyK-s7q]

You can try to repair your hdd with mhdd/victoria. Use ERASE command in MHDD (it will erase the entire hard drive though), then run scan+erase delays ON, then scan+remap ON.

[@cyberwasp461]

Thank you so much, I requested last week for a video covering smart tests and here it is!! I have a drive that is showing a "drive Reconnection count of 1" for over a year. Synology said it could be a problem, but the smart tests don't agree as the numbers you say to watch all show 0. Was wondering what you thought?

[@F7dJa]

@spacerex it would be helpful if you could do a followup on smart attributes in light of this functionality being removed from storage manager. Am no longer able to view numerical results of the smart tests and would great if you could show any work arounds.

[@WatsitTooyah]

I agree there should be a way via command line I would expect..

[@jojoba619]

HP U320 SCSI for Proliant DL-360 & 380 Gen 3 servers last forever. I had drives that ran continuously for over 10 years with minimal issues. When we replaced the servers with systems that use 2.5” SAS drives, hard drive failures increased exponentially.

[@TazzSmk]

with large capacity drives with capacities 16-22TB, is there higher likehood of failure? I mean, with a 4-bay RAID5 or SHR1, warning of one failing drive and indication of another drive potentially failing in case of RAID rebuild process kicks in, how to approach such situation, have everything backed up first before pulling out the drive? just asking, not having a problem (yet)

[@SpaceRexWill]

So if possible I would always do a backup before changing a drive, just in case. I even also will copy the data that I really need, to a usb drive just to be sure. As for larger sizes, we are also getting better drives with lower failure rates (from a failure / TB read perspective) that keeps everything working pretty well

[@kotolows]

Could you make a video on how to diagnose networking issues between PC and the NAS? I have a case with a network that has both 10 and 2.5 Gbps equipment in the mix. PC and NAS connected to the same 10 Gbps switch, but the main router is further down on the 2.5 Gbps part of the network. On some occasions when running the BlackMagic disk speed test, or even copying files from the NAS to PC, the network speed caps at 1 Gbps or 2.5 Gbps. Only reads from the NAS are affected, not writes. I either use the \\share SMB access or a mapped drive in Windows, and switching over to use another method like \\192.168... fixes the download speed. I am using the hosts file in Windows to map the NAS IP to its name on the network. This issue is quite irritating, because it means that the read performance from the NAS can randomly drop from 10 to 1 Gbps without me noticing while doing some work like editing photos or videos on the NAS.

[@tadmarshall2739]

My WD MyCloud Mirror gen 2 sometimes indicates a "drive failure" and turns the status light for that drive from blue to red. But if I power down the unit (Hibernate from the Settings menu) and then power it back up, the light is blue again and nothing seems to be amiss ... the drives pass the Quick Test, S.M.A.R.T. shows nothing bad and the logs show nothing. Any idea why this happens? Stray cosmic ray? Solar flare?

[@ashishgupta8394]

Please answer this I have bought 2 bay nas I am thinking of buying only 1 10tb hdd, can I add another 10tb disk later to get benefit of shr 1 or raid 1? or I will need to reformat all data

[@Aaron451451]

My SMART drive attributes doesn't show a 187/188, why?

[@GhostofTatooine]

Hi Will been following you for a while now, and a new subscriber too. Not sure if my issue is related to a drive failure or not, but would love a bit of advice. I am getting the notification that an "Abnormal drive failure" on either and sometimes both of my drives. The power cord had been disconnected unexpectedly and it seems this may have been the catalyst. Any idea on what is happening. Not much on the web or YT around this either.

[@ElectroCurmudgeon]

Great info. thanks.

[@holymacaronee]

Dude I've had two 1TB HDDa running for 11 yrs, with no problems, and still going!

[@Simple-Brian]

Hey SpaceRex, if I may make a request, I’d love to see a tutorial on installing Mastodon on a Synology in Docker. I think it’s a popular topic, especially considering the current situation with other social media companies and people wanting more control. Your expertise would be invaluable in guiding us through the process. Looking forward to more awesome videos from you. You’ve been a tremendous help! Keep up the fantastic work! 👍

[@EduardoSantanaSeverino]

Thank you for the video. It is really good and relevant information being shown. However, it is mostly aimed at synology nas. How about do this same forensics for truenas? Thanks

[@SpaceRexWill]

You can grab the same SMART data out of trueNAS

[@bubo1]

What is the best way to display SMART data for an external drive connected via USB?

[@SpaceRexWill]

You more than likely cannot. Very few USB connectors have the ability to pass SMART data on through

[@Pythonzzz]

That’s easy: once you hit the 3 year calendar mark on the drives, just assume they’re dying and buy new ones ;)

[@svenmichelsde]

I bet you sold this secret to at least one vendor;)

[@clipperbob960]

Looking at the screen the machine is a Synology DS 1819+ with 4 TB drives. They likely were all purchased at the same time (After Jan 25, 2019). Despite his belief that drives run forever they do not. Those drives likely had a 3 year warranty and it is now 2024 so past their expected lifetime and should have already been phased out. It is my understanding that bad sectors are found then blocked for use by the hard drive. Those bad sectors are like potholes and will just get larger over time. That explains why it was self-healing. To think only one of the drives is bad is like saying I have 65,000 miles on 45,000-mile rated tires but only this one is “possibly” bad. He claims to be worth $520K a year and sweating the cost a $100 dollar drive. Let’s think logically, lose all my pictures or pay $100 dollars. Shrugs.

[@supertekkel1]

The S.M.A.R.T attributes 187 and 188 are not visible in my NAS. Does that mean my drive's don't support being tested at that? /edit nevermind, you answered this question already below.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Yes! not all drives support all smart tests. Not a big deal

[@philippemiller4740]

I really like your videos mr Rex! I wanted to ask you if you've done a video about preparing the drives before adding them to any pool? Like stress testing them to make sure that they are ok. Over the years I've been doing that and prevented a few "good" brand new disks with good SMART data (which failed the stress tests) from being added on my pools. I am no backblaze but I feel like I prevented a few drives that might have died earlier. Does synology allows you to run a full stress test on a disk before adding them to a pool? By stress test I mean read the entire drive, zero it then read it back to make sure it's all 0 (testing if the drive is lying). kzbin.info/www/bejne/maSqiqWaaqxjn80 How and why to PreClear your hard drives before adding to your array

[@eDoc2020]

I've started doing the same and it's definitely a great way to weed out bad drives with good SMART stats. Even better if you can plot the throughput during the verify pass. If there are lots of dips it's probably bad.

[@philippemiller4740]

@@eDoc2020 Exactly prevention is the way to go. Even Rex's data shows that 1/4 of drives failing don't report bad smart data. What utility do you use to test your disks before using them? Have you found some bad drives with good smart data?

[@eDoc2020]

@@philippemiller4740 Using Linux I check SMART stats, then run nwipe (the guts of DBAN) to zero fill+verify, then check SMART again. I don't mind a few bad sectors but if the number keeps going up then I won't use the drive. I'll also use a benchmark like hdtune or GNOME disk utility's to plot the read speed over different parts of the disk. If there are noticeable dips the drive is failing and I do believe I have seen some drives which show this degradation but still show normal SMART data.

[@mikew642]

I have a WD 1TB from 2013, still going fine.

[@RoadRunner1980]

Ask Western Digital ;-)

[@vt20247]

😂😂😂😂

[@michaelpearson9]

F them segate all the way for me

[@petercdejong]

You r video’s of late are somewhat overexposed. Too bright anyway. Please fix.

[@US_Joe]

👍👍👍

[@Darkhalo314]

First! ;)

[@phill80]

It’s a Seagate. They come from the Manufacturer pre-defective…

[@cesiumion]

Better get SSDs instead of old school spinning junk

[@turbo_bikini]

And max at 4TB per disk for a boatload of money ://

[@eDoc2020]

SSDs (and SMR drives) are much more likely to suffer from controller failures than conventional hard drives.

[@cesiumion]

@@eDoc2020 ta hell, really??

[@life-longpatriot8258]

I have a DS718+ with 2 14TB Seagate Surveillance HDs (running Surveillance Station 24/7 in RAID 1) that is running fine. It also has a DX517 attached with 4 Exos 16TB HDs (Running PLEX in SHR) installed. However, the two 14TB HDs show a SMART test 188 result of 25770196999 and 25770196998, while the 16TB HDs in the DX517 show a SMART test 188 result of 4295032833 on all the drives. The Exos HDs are less than a year old, while the 14TB Seagate surveillance HDs are several years old. I do not believe the drives are going bad, but I don't understand why test 188 is showing identical results for the drives. Any idea?

[@SpaceRexWill]

So 188 is actually split up into 3 sections according to this: www.smartmontools.org/ticket/551 You would want to convert that number to hex and then take the three sections separately to figure out what they mean. But more than 0 means they have accord in the past, but it looks like they probably both occurred at the same rate. Might not be a big deal if nothing else is an issue

[@life-longpatriot8258]

@@SpaceRexWill Thank you! I wish I could flush out stuff in the log that happened in the past, since I keep getting reports every month of stuff that is old and nothing has changed, but the report doesn't list things that have changed since the last report which makes it annoying at best and a waste of time at worst.