A month ago I was whining over the apparent failure of one of my NAS grade hard disks, a Toshiba NAS N300.
As I wrote then, before discarding the disk, it was subjected to a short SMART test, then a “badblocks” test and finally a long SMART test. The testing turned out somewhat surprising:
# badblocks -svw -b 4096 -c 262144 /dev/sda
Checking for bad blocks in read-write mode
From block 0 to 1465130645
Testing with pattern 0xaa: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0x55: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0xff: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0x00: done
Reading and comparing: done
Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found. (0/0/0 errors)No errors during a lenghty (+100 hours) badblocks testing, and the pre and post SMART tests also showed no errors. Thus the N300 has been rehabilitated and returned to storage as an additional cold standby spare disk (as I already had ordered a new Seagate IronWolf).
So, what happened then? While I feel a certain relief that my favourite hard disk type wasn’t starting to let me down, it also worries me, that TrueNAS Core suddenly removed the disk from the pool. Why did it do that, what happened? My usual Google-Fu hasn’t brought any similar occurences, so I feel a little alone with this problem 😲.
Should I worry? Is it hardware related? SATA controller or SATA cables?