[Discuss] Failing WD Disks

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

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.