[SOLVED] is this yet another dying HDD?

[stinji]

I must be extremely unlucky, because for the past 3 years SATA HDD's just keep dying on me... they usually just give up within a year of buying.

All my SSD's are fine, and I've even had PATA disks survive for over 10 years, so I'm not sure what's going on here. I do tend to look for the best $/gb though so it's probably my own fault for being a cheapskate. I'm Dutch though so that's my defense; we're all stingy

Anyway, for this latest contender I have (as per usual) no idea what exactly is going on. Is this a sign of a dying HDD? And if not; what can I do to make this 6TB bad boi run normally again?

Reads are fine, but when I do writes they start out A-OK;

And then after a minute or so the write speed just grinds to a halt, but 'Activity' stays at 100% :

Every now and then it shows a tiny sign of life, but shortly after it just drops to zero again.. and it keeps going back and forth like that:

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this? According to SMART tools it's all OK, but I doubt this is the case. Anything else I can do to investigate?

 

[Koekieezz]

Either its broken or it's using a SMR device. Yes, SMR device is REAL slow and purposed for Archive only.

 

[stinji]

I had never heard of this technology before. So I looked it up, and it might explain the behaviour.

So basically it writes to a very limited amount of 'fast' storage (basically a cache) and then when idle it moves this data to the SMR storage. But in my case the cache is full so it's moving the data there while I'm still busy writing, causing the write speed to drop to zero while the disk is still busy doing the move, thus explaining the activity. Is this correct?

But then I'm still wondering why the drive didn't have this issue before. I mean, it's not like the 'cache' size changed, and I'm not writing bigger workloads than before either. Still a bit of a mystery, but thanks for informing me about SMR either way.

 

[Koekieezz]

I had never heard of this technology before. So I looked it up, and it might explain the behaviour.

So basically it writes to a very limited amount of 'fast' storage (basically a cache) and then when idle it moves this data to the SMR storage. But in my case the cache is full so it's moving the data there while I'm still busy writing, causing the write speed to drop to zero while the disk is still busy doing the move, thus explaining the activity. Is this correct?

But then I'm still wondering why the drive didn't have this issue before. I mean, it's not like the 'cache' size changed, and I'm not writing bigger workloads than before either. Still a bit of a mystery, but thanks for informing me about SMR either way.

To be simple, it is like a shinghield on a house roof, the read tracks are great, but to overwrite/modify the bits on the disk, first it must read the track, copy it to cache, and write the information, and then move back the data previously held in the cache. SMR technology used on SSHD should be more ok since it got bigger cache size.

If you want a CMR drive go for Seagate Skyhawk or WD Purple that got 64MB for max 6TB.