[Discuss] Failing WD Disks

[Shirley Márquez Dúlcey]

I'm curious. Are those 5 TB drives 2.5" drives (which would be cutting
edge) or 3.5" (which is if anything lagging edge by now)?

On Thu, May 18, 2023 at 12:36 PM Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:

> I have two portable USB-C 5TB Western Digital portable disks that have
> failed, that I will be doing a warranty return on.
>
> Before I can do the return I need to argue that they are broken, and as
> I do encrypted file systems, and on Linux, and not even conventional at
> that (one is ZFS, the other brtfs), I can't just say "Look, it can't
> read files." So overnight I left this running:
>
>    root at tinpan:/home/kentborg# date ; dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=60M
> status=progress
>    Wed 17 May 2023 02:44:09 PM PDT
>    2450528763904 bytes (2.5 TB, 2.2 TiB) copied, 14740 s, 166 MB/s
>    dd: error reading '/dev/sda': Input/output error
>    38950+1 records in
>    38950+1 records out
>    2450528763904 bytes (2.5 TB, 2.2 TiB) copied, 14743.8 s, 166 MB/s
>
> With unrecoverable media errors in /var/log/kern.log.
>
> Now I have started the same on the other disk, expecting the same, some
> hours into the future.
>
> Man, these disks are big. Even at (what to me seems) a crazy fast IO
> rate, it takes a long time to traverse the disk.
>
>
> Lessons:
>
> - Spinning media can have problems.
>
> - Portable 5TB WD drives are maybe too bleeding edge.
>
> - Even if it seems to take forever, next time I set up one of these
> disks I am going to first dd it full of random data. It will be a test
> of the disk, and makes the encrypted disk more secure.
>
>
> Grrr.
>
>
> -kb, the Kent who gets nervous when one of his two ping-pong backup
> disks fails, and a few months later another one fails.
>
>
> P.S. At least /dev/urandom, at least on my current machine, is a lot
> faster than it used to be.
>
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