RC 5 Results from WD Red Drives

[haggis]

My old WD Mycloud Mirror NAS with two WD Red 4TB drives has been failing so I wanted to check the drives which is something I couldn't do with version 6.0. I had already replaced one of the drives 2 years ago so I have 3 drives I can test. I created a bootable USB per your instructions with RC5 and cobbled the 4TB drive into my 15 year old Sony laptop, my only PC running under BIOS, and which normally runs Windows 10. I ran RC5 at Level 2. The first drive started getting unrecovered sectors on the 5th tick of the Graphic Status Display. Then it started crashing out with unresponsive errors. The second drive had 14 unrecovered sectors while still on the first row of the Graphic Status Display. Then it too crashed with error "This drive has stopped responding to commands." So both drives are junk with bad sectors and probably bad electronics too.

My conclusion is that RC5 is working perfectly unless some bug causes it to randomly crash after running for many hours. A more likely cause is that the old drives have electronics failures, and/or the old Sony laptop doesn't like the way I cobbled the 4TB drives into it [I removed the Sony drive and ran a data cable from it to the 4TB and powered the 4TB from a separate source]. Confirmed: At least I now know that it is obviously time to retire the old and slow WD Mycloud Mirror.

 

[ColbyBouma]

Normally I would agree that the drives are the culprit, but someone else is having trouble with large drives in RC5, so it's possible there's a bug.

https://forums.grc.com/threads/spinrite-6-1-rc5-stops-on-3tb-4tb-and-10tb-drives.1387

 

[Steve]

@ColbyBouma : I think that the trouble described in that other thread are different than what @haggis is saying. In that thread, @sweeney746 describes a "lock up" of his system rather than the "drive stopped responding to commands" pop-up.

@haggis : Hold onto those drives for a bit longer, if you would. We have pretty clearly identified a problem with SpinRite's error recovery. There are two different "red screens" that can appear. The one that's "terminal" says that the drive has declared a "Drive Fault" condition and to proceed it must be power cycled. The other is the "this drive has stopped responding to commands" — which is the trouble you are seeing. And I believe THAT message is a "false positive" and is due to SpinRite being too "hair triggered" after an error occurs.

Before long I'll be addressing this issue and an RC6 release and at that time I'd LOVE to have your confirmation that even though those drives are troubled, SpinRite keeps on trucking through them!

 

[sweeney746]

@ColbyBouma : I think that the trouble described in that other thread are different than what @haggis is saying. In that thread, @sweeney746 describes a "lock up" of his system rather than the "drive stopped responding to commands" pop-up.

@haggis : Hold onto those drives for a bit longer, if you would. We have pretty clearly identified a problem with SpinRite's error recovery. There are two different "red screens" that can appear. The one that's "terminal" says that the drive has declared a "Drive Fault" condition and to proceed it must be power cycled. The other is the "this drive has stopped responding to commands" — which is the trouble you are seeing. And I believe THAT message is a "false positive" and is due to SpinRite being too "hair triggered" after an error occurs.

Before long I'll be addressing this issue and an RC6 release and at that time I'd LOVE to have your confirmation that even though those drives are troubled, SpinRite keeps on trucking through them!

I may not be using the correct wording but (the drive stopped responding, the computer stopped responding) so I think we are having the same problem. I ran the 3TB again last night and it stopped again this time it was 4:48 before end and got one undiscovered sector (it didn't last time). I know we are now waiting on SC6 and hoping it fixes it.

 

[Steve]

Yesterday, I (finally!) managed to get autonomous server-side hardware HSM-based on-the-fly code signing to work. I've been struggling with this for two weeks. This is just local code at this point. But once I get this integrated into GRC's server, I'll be able to return to SpinRite and get the next release candidates out!