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acalvo's avatar
acalvo
Star
Jan 08, 2018

WD RED Smart bad info?

Hello community!

 

Last April I bought two WD Red 4TB WD40EFRX hard drives (I bought them with a difference of 7 days) and replaced them with the two 2TB WD Green I had in the Readynas Ultra 2 with RAIDIATOR 4.2.31 (Readynas HCL indicates that this hard disks are compatible with readynas ultra 2) . I did a hard reset to the ReadyNAS Ultra 2 and started with the default configuration to configure it and enter all my data (about 2tb).

 

The NAS will have been online all this time (it was stopped about 10 days only on summer). If it was on all that time, there is something that does not work well in the SMART of the hard disks or the way in which the SMART is read.

 

Today I find that the hard drives have 2528 hours and 2359 hours respectively. Something is wrong. If you have been practically 24 hours since April you can not have that number of hours that is equivalent to about 105 days for the first and 98 days for the second. However, the NAS now has 154 days of uptime. Is this normal?

 

I do not know if this is the problem of the Raidiator or the SMART of the WD RED, has this happened to more people?

Taking advantage, I downloaded the logs, and there are the last 10 dates of smart that I attach to this message. And there are times when the number of hours is greater than the current one. How is it possible?

 

2017-11-05:

sda: Power_On_Hours 3378

sdb: Power_On_Hours 3209

Complete log: https://pastebin.com/7FCvfH6A

 

2017-11-12:

sda: Power_On_Hours 3546

sdb: Power_On_Hours 3377

Complete log: https://pastebin.com/VTR13The

 

2017-11-19:

sda: Power_On_Hours 2520

sdb: Power_On_Hours 2352

Complete log: https://pastebin.com/G6AZ7n9v

 

 

2017-11-26:

sda: Power_On_Hours 2688

sdb: Power_On_Hours 2520

Complete log: https://pastebin.com/46Y9HSZR

 

2017-12-03:

sda: Power_On_Hours 2856

sdb: Power_On_Hours 2688

Complete log: https://pastebin.com/kSNkTxxY

 

2017-12-10:

sda: Power_On_Hours 3024

sdb: Power_On_Hours 2855

Complete log: https://pastebin.com/8qEYxec9

 

2017-12-17:

sda: Power_On_Hours 3192

sdb: Power_On_Hours 3023

Complete log: https://pastebin.com/mHx4EWHy

 

2017-12-24:

sda: Power_On_Hours 3360

sdb: Power_On_Hours 3191

Complete log: https://pastebin.com/0U1M5TbV

 

2017-12-31:

sda: Power_On_Hours 3527

sdb: Power_On_Hours 3359

Complete log: https://pastebin.com/ezMstNPu

 

2017-01-07:

sda: Power_On_Hours 2502

sdb: Power_On_Hours 2334

Complete log: https://pastebin.com/qdZXfzz3

 

 

I attach the complete logs of SMART on pastebin and I would appreciate it if you would orient me to this strange problem

 

Thanks to everyone!

 

 

6 Replies

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  • kohdee's avatar
    kohdee
    NETGEAR Expert

    Take into consideration that RAIDiator is old and that version of SMART is from 2011. You could be having a version incompatiblity. Maybe some fixes went into newer versions of SMART. I Google'd and saw that SMART adds additional support for RED drives in smartmontools in later versions. 

    • acalvo's avatar
      acalvo
      Star

      First of all: thank you very much Kohdee for your answer, it has made me think of some things to find some kind of explanation.

      I have tried to advance a little more in this curious case.

       

      I did what WD suggested and I ran the test with their tool. I checked the SMART, and the tool says that the SMART is OK, although I do not see the raw values ​​of each record (I attached captures WD tool vs Crystal disk info):

       /dev/sdb

      /dev/sda

       

      In what the WD wanted, I think, was to ensure that the surface of the disk is fine. I executed the quick test and the slow test and everything has given OK. However, I still have the doubt of why the hard disk hours descend at certain times. (and that crystaldiskinfo continues to confirm my theory).

       

      I have made the decision, following the previous comment, to update the BIOS to version 1.8 and take advantage of and update to OS6 that will have a newer Smartmontool in the monitoring (I downloaded the OS4 logs).

       

      To leave a record here, when I transferred the information when installing OS6 it was approximately 6 days the first hard disk running without the other, to fill the volume and force a resynchronization.

       

      That is to say, on January 25, 2017 at 7:52 pm, when I inserted the second hard disk, the statistics of the disk are:

       

      / dev / sda: 2929 hours
      / dev / sdb: 2643 hours

       

       

       

      From that moment on they will be 24 hours continuously, so that the SMART hour counters of both disks should increase correctly in the future (if these counters are lower than these values ​​in the future it is definitely a SMART error that the WD tool is not able to notify).

       

      I know that OS6 is not officially supported, but this happened on OS4 (which is official) being connected to the SATA ports of the NAS chipset (I think it's an Intel® NM10 Express) and that it should not be incompatible and now with a OS / Debian / Linux Kernel / Smartmontools much more updated.

       

      I will keep you all informed.

       

      Thanks to everyone.

       

      /dev/sda/dev/sdb

  • StephenB's avatar
    StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User

    I haven't seen this before.  Overall the power-on hours stats (like all SMART stats) are maintained in the drive, though of course the NAS itself is periodically reading them out and storing them.  

     

    If you can connect the drives to a Windows PC, then you could check the stats there.  Acronis Drive Monitor is one free tool you can use (though they will require that you give them your email address).  https://www.acronis.com/pl-pl/homecomputing/download/drive-monitor/

     

    If you have ssh enabled, you can also query the SMART stats from the drives directly, using smartctl.

     

     

    • acalvo's avatar
      acalvo
      Star

      First of all, thank you very much StephenB

       

      Yes, I have SSH enabled, in readlity was the first thing I thought about checking it by command line. When I tried it via SSH I did it with this command:

       

      smartctl --all / dev / sda
      smartctl --all / dev / sdb

       

      ... and is similar to the information in the last SMART log of readynas

       

      I contacted Western Digital to have the hard drives less than a year old (of the two year warranty they should have with Spanish law) and they came to tell me that it is likely to be an incompatibility with the device (a unconvincing answer) and to get in touch with Netgear.

       

      After reading your message, I disconnected the readynas, and I took the sdb device and connected it by SATA directly on my computer (Intel i3570K with the motherboard Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H) believing that maybe the readynas incorrectly reads the SMART from the hard drives. From Spain at least, I do not see the download in the link that you mention of Acronis, even so, I used a similar program that I use daily to check the SMART of the internal hard disks of my computer: CrystalDisk Info.

       

      https://www.alvaro-calvo.com/forumpics/smart_sdb_wd40efrx_2.jpg

       

      The information shown is a number of hours too low and similar to what smartctl showed me on the NAS, I insist on the last disconnection of readynas had 151 days of uptime, something I do not understand and more when they have worked almost always since April 2017 and we are in January 2018. A hard drive has been running one week longer than the other, that's fine; but I do not understand, reviewing the logs that I attached, as it is possible that above the 3600 hours approx. - 3700 hours approx. At some point the counters are reset at around 2500 hours and on the two discs "simultaneously" (it is true that smart logs are recorded once a week and this may happen to each disc on days other than the week, but it is clear that I suspect that they follow a pattern).

       

      Could a supposed incompatibility with the readynas cause this failure in SMART? Because this happens on both hard drives. I honestly find it extremely strange, but I believe anything. I must say that the old WD Green that had 2TB (WD20EARS) have always shown correctly the number of hours in operation and have been 5 years without stopping.

       

      Arrived at this moment, I am worried about the most important thing: the stored data, I do not know if I can trust the SMART of the hard disks (I have backup, but I am interested in the reliability of the NAS + hard disks).

       

      What should I do? Change from NAS? Or is it impossible for the NAS to be the cause of the problem?

       

      Thanks a lot!

      • StephenB's avatar
        StephenB
        Guru - Experienced User

        acalvo wrote:

         

        Could a supposed incompatibility with the readynas cause this failure in SMART? Because this happens on both hard drives. I honestly find it extremely strange, but I believe anything. 

         


        I don't see how.  The drives are maintaining this data, and you are seeing the same low values when you do the readout on Windows with a different tool. 

         

        Also, lots of folks use these drives in Ultras, and I haven't ever seen this reported.

         


        acalvo wrote:

         

        Arrived at this moment, I am worried about the most important thing: the stored data, I do not know if I can trust the SMART of the hard disks (I have backup, but I am interested in the reliability of the NAS + hard disks).

         

        Without knowing the cause, it's difficult to say how big the risk is.   You could try replacing one of the Reds with a Seagate Ironwolf I guess.  That would reduce the exposure.

         

        Another strategy is to run scheduled disk scrubs on the NAS - they do serve as good diagnostics, though it is tricky if you can't really on SMART.

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