Hey everyone! I'm not very experienced with hard drives, so I'm hoping to get some advice here. I noticed that my NAS started reporting bad sectors on one of my drives during regular checks, so I ordered a replacement. After swapping it out, I ran a repair on the storage pool, but then another drive showed bad sectors too. I didn't get warnings like I did the first time. I've plugged both drives into my PC and checked them with CrystalDiskInfo. The first drive has 1 reallocated sector and is marked as Bad, while the second drive shows 100 reallocated sectors but is only marked as Caution. I'm assuming both drives are unreliable now and should be discarded. I'm also curious why the first one is rated worse despite having fewer reallocated sectors. Finally, since I bought all four drives together, should I be concerned about the remaining two? Thanks for your help!
1 Answer
It's common for mechanical hard drives to fail around the same time if they're from the same batch, much like car tires. If your NAS is set up in RAID 5, you can keep using the drives that are still functioning and replace them only when they show errors.
That makes sense! I’m using a Synology NAS with SHR, so I have one drive redundancy. After the first alert, I replaced that one. When the pool rebuild warned about the second, I replaced that too. Thankfully I didn't lose anything. I have scheduled S.M.A.R.T. tests, so I’ll be prepared for any issues with the other two. I'm also thinking about scheduling the NAS to turn off at night to extend the drives' lifespan.