Replace a Drive

[danb35]

Should I purchase a 2nd drive to replace drive 4?

I'd say not yet. Pending sectors in the single digits, IMO, don't call for immediate replacement of the drive.

Should I now run SMART tests on all drives? Short or long?

Yes. Set up scheduled tests, so you know they're happening regularly, and kick off a long test for each drive.

On the drive temps, you could consider more fans, better fans, running your current fans faster, and/or placing them differently. Basements are generally good (as they tend to be cool), but not if they don't have, and can't get, Ethernet connections.

 

[joeschmuck]

So as it's been discussed the drive with S/N: WD-WCC4E9JLLV5S is suspect for failure however @danb35 states it's not really considered at risk yet and I agree. The Pending Sector errors could go away as soon as the drive writes to those specific sectors which were problematic. Becasue you were able to "fix" the problem by moving the connection it could have been the culprit.

Lets talk about the cable for a second. Replace it. Odds are the cable is bad, not the motherboard connector. I know it sounds odd for a cable to just go bad but it does happen and it happened to me a few months ago. I moved the cables around and the problem went away for about a week and then it came back. Thankfully I have spare SATA cables. So take my advice, replace the cable and throw the old one in the trash so you don't accidentally pick it up some day and use it.

Testing your drives... You need to routinely test your hard drives. Ensure you setup SMART testing on all the drives. I would start a long test on the suspect drive right now. Since this is a read-only test, it would not clear the pending sector errors. I run a SMART Long test once a week and a Short test daily.

One more thing to bring up... Drives 3 & 4 appear to be WD Green drives and are now out of warranty (based on runtime hours). The Load_Cycle_Count is very excessive as well, well over the rating WD gives it. I'm not saying it's going to fail anytime soon but it's something to be aware of. If you plan to retain these hard drives you might want to try to change the head loading timer to 300 seconds for these two drives only, but you can live with these as-is and just see how long they last. Here is a link to a thread which discusses this if you wanted to pursue it. The other two drives are fine.

I hope things go well.

 

[Stux]

So take my advice, replace the cable and throw the old one in the trash so you don't accidentally pick it up some day and use it.

I always cut that sort of thing in half. Invariably someone helpfully rescues it otherwise.

Thankfully you used RaidZ2 and it appears to have saved your bacon multiple times ;)