Brand new WD SSD shows FAULTED after 1 night

[baronvonsatchel]

Yesterday I bought a couple of 250GB WD Blue M.2 SATA SSDs to replace the two random non-matching drives I was using for my app/VM pool (the old drives wouldn't go to waste but become SLOG and cache for my main data pool). I bought them specifically because they were the cheapest the computer store had, I knew they wouldn't be fast or fancy but they oughta be good enough to run a Plex server on. Today I woke up to a dozen CRITICAL ERROR emails from my NAS telling me one of them has errors and that the pool is operating in a "degraded state."

This is the first time I've dealt with disk errors in TrueNAS and I'm not sure what to do. Is there a future for this drive, or have I bought a dud that needs to be returned to the store? Is it safe to leave as-is or should I offline it immediately? I have them in a PCIE to 2X M.2 carrier card, could it be the card's fault (either the card's IO is faulty, or worse it damaged the disk)?

Thanks in advance for any advice

 

[Ericloewe]

Damage to the disk is not likely, but a crap controller is. Could also be the disk, failures do happen.

What does the SMART data for the disk say?

 

[baronvonsatchel]

Damage to the disk is not likely, but a crap controller is. Could also be the disk, failures do happen.

What does the SMART data for the disk say?

It fails to even run the test...

 

[Ericloewe]

And I assume that it does work for the other disk?

 

[baronvonsatchel]

I found the problem when I took the carrier card out to try reseating the drives. The decorative "heatsink" on the card was pressing down on them so they bowed in the middle, and there was nothing to support the underside of the drive. I was lucky it didn't kill both of them. Fortunately, these being the cheapest SSDs I could find, I'm only out around $30. I left the good one installed but took the heatsink off the carrier card, and I'll buy a replacement for the dead one tomorrow.

 

[ZPrime]

I found the problem when I took the carrier card out to try reseating the drives. The decorative "heatsink" on the card was pressing down on them so they bowed in the middle, and there was nothing to support the underside of the drive. I was lucky it didn't kill both of them. Fortunately, these being the cheapest SSDs I could find, I'm only out around $30. I left the good one installed but took the heatsink off the carrier card, and I'll buy a replacement for the dead one tomorrow.

Did you try testing it after removing the heatsink?

Possible that no permanent damage was done, and just the way the heatsink was bowing the PCB was preventing something from making proper contact...