HDD Puzzle: best way to determine which one is on its last legs?

[orangpelupa]

If you're gauging speed from data copy to it from your troubled drives, the limiting factor is likely the troubled drives.

As for SMR drives, you will see normal performance until you hit the write threshold at which point you will know it as it will tank far below the speeds you're seeing now, like 10 MB/s area.

using a known good drive as a source turns out it went from 100MB/s down to 50MB/s then 20MB/s.
if i wait for ~5 minutes then initiate copy again. it went up to 100MB/s again then finally stabilize at 20MB/s again.

it never reaches as low as 10MB/s

 

[arandomguy]

What's the exact model number? Generally since the controversy (that gained major traction) of when WD silently switched their Red drives to SMR silently a few years back the manufacturers have all been listing whether the internal drives are CMR or SMR nowadays.

i bought them individually from the official stores.

2 WDs were basically packed unsafely in a cardboard boxes. 1 DOA, 1 works fine. I buy 1 more WD, this time packed with lots and lots of bubble wraps. DOA.

When i RMA my Seagate to Seagate, i packed it with wooden box on the outer layer, and bubble wraps inside of it, and double anti static bag on the HDD itself. Dunno how Seagate will ship my replacement HDD.

I installed them vertically.

I also have 3 HDDs horizontally installed. 1 is toshiba/hitachi that got bad sectors and lots of head failure count but still work (slowly) and out of warranty

By bubble wrap, were they in those specific hard drive "pod" type wraps in a properly sized box or just generic shipping wrap? By hard drive specific packing I mean something like this -

Spoiler: bracket

or -

Spoiler: bubble pod

And that would be double boxed as well - https://www.servethehome.com/newegg-hard-drive-packaging-2011-update/

Shipping single drives is just a huge lottery. Unless you use an impractical amounts of protection if it's dropped to a hard surface at any point that drive is likely going to be DOA or going to be prone to failure, and those delivery workers tend to be working under heavy time pressure.

 

[orangpelupa]

Model st4000vx007 for both my original drive and the refurbished replacement. According to datasheet, it's cmr.

The Seagate came with the usual anti static bag that was wrapped by normal bubble wrap (like the one you get when buying cheap Chinese stuff from aliexpress) and put inside a single layer cardboard box, with soft foams as padding/filling.

They didn't reuse my packaging (2x anti static bag, bubble wrap wrapped around 5x, bubble padding/filling, put inside a cardboard box, that was put inside a wooden box)

 

[orangpelupa]

If you're gauging speed from data copy to it from your troubled drives, the limiting factor is likely the troubled drives.

As for SMR drives, you will see normal performance until you hit the write threshold at which point you will know it as it will tank far below the speeds you're seeing now, like 10 MB/s area.

does SMR drives have slow read as one of its characteristics?

my replacement seagate read speed crawls to 20MB/s after the disk have less than 100GB free space.

older files that were written before it have such small space still can be read at 100MB/s.

as a workaround, I'll simply partition off the last 200GB or so.

 

[BRiT]

does SMR drives have slow read as one of its characteristics?

Nope. It reads at typical speeds.

The only downside is the write-wall where performance drops.

If you're having horrible read performance the issue is something other than SMR vs CMR.