Been talking to Grok again

Grok has outlined a procedure for testing 2nd hand 3xWD Red 3TB drives I have picked up on the bay of plenty. Including a disk scanner called Victoria 5.37. Anyone heard of it, it's portable and works well even if it takes 8 hours to scan for bad blocks on 3TB drives.

Grok has no recollection of our conversation on WD Reds. One of which is arriving tomorrow. It told me to drop the SMART stats for its opinion. Pft.

2 WD Reds arrived today. A 2017 and 2014 model. Both have been tested with Crystal Disk and showed no errors. So started writing my files to both of them and the 2017 model bad blocks and reallocated sectors started shooting up. The 2014 so far has been fine. Both of them low power on hours < 15k hours.

Seller has agreed to replace the 2017 and hope its better but if not a refund. Also found a listing for "Brand New" WD Red so have ordered it as it wasn't much more than a second hand one.

Remind me. Why are you buying a 8 year and 10 year old mechanical drives? Penny dirt cheapo storage or you're a masochist? 😅

I know there must be some masochism involved somewhere but when you can pick up a 3TB for 20 quid it seems like a bargain especially with a 30 day money back guarantee. I am hoping the brand new one is actually brand new. Paying £120 for a new one seems like masochism.

I thought Reds were their middle of the road general purpose drives. Are they known to have exceptionally long lives then?

With anything mechanical or indeed electronic it's often less about the spinning hours as it is about the power cycles.

I wasn't unheard of all that long ago, to have a machine which had been rarely (or ever) powered down in 10+ years to suddenly stop working after a relocation move.

Reds are supposed to be designed for 24/7 operation in NAS storage although I am partial to a Seagate Ironwolf myself but too expensive even second hand.

I never turn my PCs off because once an Electronics Lecturer told us that Silicon doesn't like voltage to be applied and reapplied ad infinitum. "Marvellous invention but likes to be left on."

Ah fair enough. I made the huge mistake of putting some 2.5" WD Black drives in one of my first NAS boxes many years ago. They let me down badly. Salutary lesson learnt; don't put the wrong drives in the wrong box / application.

I've now been running 8 IronWolf drives since 2019 in the 'new' (not any more) Synology and they have been generally fine, albeit two have some bad sectors, but otherwise they just plod on.

I'd be too nervous to put an 11 year old drive of whatever extraction into anything I care about the data though.

They are for redundancy. Main backup is external SSD/Cloud which is error free but at the moment it seems like the luck of the draw getting a good mechanical.

That's 2 x WD Reds going back for refund. 2014 and 2013. 2014 had 3 bad sectors appear and was corrupting files after a copy and verify, didn't seem to remap them looks like a firmware bug. The 2013 was DOA.