Question Seagate Ironwolf as single harddrive - ERC disabled?

[Mumintroll]

Hello!
When I built my budget pc I went for a 4tb harddrive that I installed Windows 11 on, and a 1tb tlc ssd for games. (It's a regular home pc, there are no raid controllers in it.)

The reseller almost only had NAS harddrives for sale, so I picked one, Seagate Ironwolf. It was almost the same price as the Barracuda series, but they didn't have Barracudas in stock at the moment. I didn't know much about NAS drives but I've read that they should be more reliable, but that's up for debate.

What I didn't know about is their TLEC/ERC time limits.
I read a small article here from a writer at partitionwizard and learned that NAS drives can have a very limited time set to retry reading a sector, which could lead to incorrect bad sector marking, and data loss.

Hovewer I also read from other sites that NAS drives nowadays have their TLEC/ERC disabled by default.
I found a tool, called smartmontools, to check that status on my drive and it does say it's disabled.

C:\Program Files\smartmontools\bin>smartctl -l scterc /dev/sda
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-w64-mingw32-w11-b22631] (sf-7.4-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

SCT Error Recovery Control:
Read: Disabled
Write: Disabled


Does that mean that I don't have to worry about ERC marking sectors as bad when they might not be, as mentioned in the article?
When I get some funds availible I'll probably get another ssd and then migrate to it. But in the meantime I'll be using the harddrive.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Even if TLEC/ERC is enabled, I wouldn't really worry about it. You're at least guaranteed the drive will work fine for the warranty period, which is 3 years for an IronWolf drive. And it may be many years before it hits the condition where it starts marking some sectors as bad.

 

[geofelt]

I think it is a big mistake to put your C drive on a HDD,
Use a ssd of some type for the C drive. 256gb at least.
Add a HDD for capacity if you need to.

 

[Mumintroll]

Even if TLEC/ERC is enabled, I wouldn't really worry about it. You're at least guaranteed the drive will work fine for the warranty period, which is 3 years for an IronWolf drive. And it may be many years before it hits the condition where it starts marking some sectors as bad.

I would be worried if ERC was enabled, since it's usually only a few seconds on the time limit. But since it's disabled it'll work more like a regular harddrive when it comes to handle suspicious sectors, if I understand it correctly?

 

[Mumintroll]

Update:
Seagate Live agent support confirmed that Ironwolf drives are shipped with ERC disabled by default nowadays.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I would be worried if ERC was enabled, since it's usually only a few seconds on the time limit. But since it's disabled it'll work more like a regular harddrive when it comes to handle suspicious sectors, if I understand it correctly?

If you're getting into a condition where ERC is triggering bad sectors, then it's very likely the drive is starting to show its age anyway. I suspect ERC flags bad sectors sooner, because once the drive is going down hill, further use will make things worse faster. And if you need to pull data from the drive, you should do it earlier than later.

It doesn't matter for consumer drives because, well, it's assumed if you have anything you really need saved, you have a backup somewhere.