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@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.
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