I’ve had a drive in my FreeNAS server for a long time now with a Current Pending Sector error. As it and no other errors (see below) have incremented I’ve been ignoring it.
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 016 Pre-fail Always - 0 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 067 Pre-fail Always - 0 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0008 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x000a 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
As some research seemed to suggest that I can ignore this as it’s not incrementing but it wont reset or be marked as an error unless I some how write to that sector I thought I’d finally take it out and mess around with it on my Windows 7 desktop.
Firstly I offlined the drive, powered off the server and then put it in my Freecom desktop USB drive caddy.
After powering it on and seeing it mounted as drive 5 in Drive Management tool I wanted to use smartctl to view and test it.
This proved a bit tricky as it’s via a USB bridge, but after some searching, using this web page as reference, and more importantly an administrator level command prompt I got the following command working:
smartctl -d usbjmicron -a /dev/sdf
I could then initiate a short and long tests. Interestingly the short test seemed to finish but when trying to re-run it or run a long test I saw:
C:\WINDOWS\system32>smartctl -d usbjmicron -t short /dev/sdf smartctl 6.3 2014-07-26 r3976 [i686-w64-mingw32-win8(64)] (sf-6.3-1) Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION === Can't start self-test without aborting current test (40% remaining), add '-t force' option to override, or run 'smartctl -X' to abort test.
Hmmm, not good? No it was fine I didn’t wait long enough.
So after trying a few more short and one long test with it failing, interestingly not at a specific LBA, I did a full format which took nearly 24 hours. Afterwards the Current Pending Sector error disappeared, no other errors appeared and the short test completed ok:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 016 Pre-fail Always - 0 2 Throughput_Performance 0x0005 134 134 054 Pre-fail Offline - 87 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 742 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 067 Pre-fail Always - 0 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0008 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x000a 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 31911 - # 2 Short offline Completed: read failure 40% 31858 - # 3 Extended offline Completed: read failure 10% 31856 - # 4 Short offline Completed: read failure 40% 31849 - # 5 Short offline Completed: read failure 40% 31849 - # 6 Short offline Completed: read failure 40% 31849 - # 7 Short offline Completed: read failure 40% 31789 -
So back it goes into my server to carrry on! If this happens again I’ll just offline it and then use the FreeNAS CLI to do the above.