Refurb: 12TB HGST Ultrastar HC520 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Expired

This is an awful analogy.

It's much more like buying a used car than old food. Can you buy a used car and get 10 or more years out of it, sure. Can you get a lemon that dies within a year, also sure. Does a new car guarantee a problem-free vehicle, absolutely not.
The price difference needs to be enormous for most people to bite on used vs new, and it is here. So is it worth a shot, IMO Yes because you should have backups anyway. If the seller stands behind their hardware, what exactly is the risk? No, really, tell me.

Because a new drive can also fail, so if you're relying on drives not to fail as your data integrity strategy..... that's ridiculous. Might as well buy drives for less and take your chances. Plus, you should be aggressively testing ANY new (to you) drive, regardless of its age or where it came from. Transit introduces all kinds of issues.

Yeah. Not everyone is rich. People like me needs dozens of hard drives each year. This is the only affordable means to a lot of hobbyist.

I received my drive today and installed it into a WD External USB drive case that I had previously shucked. The drive spins up and is listed in Windows disk management as not initialized but any attempt to initialize it gives "Access is denied". WD Dashboard's smart diagnostics say the drive it good, but I just can't do anything with it. Unfortunately this is the only hardware I have to test this drive as I use only mini PCs and laptops now. I've searched for possible solutions, some of which say that the drive might be bad, or encrypted. Has anyone any suggestions before I try to RMA it?

I received my drive today and installed it into a WD External USB drive case that I had previously shucked. The drive spins up and is listed in Windows disk management as not initialized but any attempt to initialize it gives "Access is denied". WD Dashboard's smart diagnostics say the drive it good, but I just can't do anything with it. Unfortunately this is the only hardware I have to test this drive as I use only mini PCs and laptops now. I've searched for possible solutions, some of which say that the drive might be bad, or encrypted. Has anyone any suggestions before I try to RMA it?

There are numerous possibilities, so there's a good chance it's not a faulty drive. One concern is that those WD bridges can be locked to certain types of drives. It may be possible to unlock them by severing one or two pins on the board. Check out these links for more info:

Link 1 [youtube.com]

Link 2 [imgur.com]

my last shipment from 2 days ago ... had 2 drives that would not initalize , and 2 drives did initalize (of those 2 ... 1 had caution in smart, and 1 did pass smart.

Page after page of the same argument. Every. Single. Time. Slickdeals should find some way to form a support forum for people who get so triggered about using used enterprise drives. I don't understand what need this is meeting for them to come in to every single slick deals thread about used Enterprise drives and harp on how they are unreliable. It's baffling and it's tiring.

Aight. I might give it a shot. Who is the best vendor this kind of a transaction?

If you had Windows do a full (not quick) format, there's no reason to run that chkdsk command. It will just be repeating the same test. I like HDDScan and Victoria because they don't just detect bad sectors but also weak/slow sectors.

Those who plan to use the above or other HDD integrity tests should probably set the ms timeout to a realistic number. 250 has been suggested by a HDD web site.
The default setting in the Victoria program is 10,000 which is on the very high side.
A very low ms number setting may erroneously show a drive full of slow/weak sectors, and a very high number will show no such slow/weak sectors even though they may exist.

To do a full read test on these 10Tb and 12Tb drives will take about a week using Victoria.
It may show something like this in red letters for any weak/slow sectors that were not picked up by the Windows CHKDSK test:
9:59:07 : Warning! Block start at 4579686400 (2.3 TB) = 9203 ms
10:37:42 : Warning! Block start at 4698906624 (2.4 TB) = 8532 ms

This 10Tb hard drive is still running the Victoria test after 3 days with about 50% done.



This is some relevant info on a 7200 rpm drive's ms timeout:

https://superuser.com/questions/9...ading-time

It seems that a hard drive with a high ms timeout sectors should be corrected to mark those sectors as bad, because they'll go bad soon.

An optimal sector timeout for a 7200 rpm hard drive would be about 8.33 ms or at worst perhaps the 250 ms suggested by the other HDD site.
It definitely should not be in the multi thousand ms, and if there are such slow /weak sectors they should be marked as bad and excluded from use.
IF there are hundreds or thousands such slow/weak sectors found, IF these tests are run properly, it's probably best to return these drives.

Another thing that was pointed online was to do these tests plugged in to the SATA interface and not use a USB external box.

It's a good idea to run the Windows chkdsk, and these more sophisticated tests on these used drives, BUT, one MUST know how to run them reliably, and that takes some research online.
These tests should not be run if one doesn't know how to use them reliably. Just stick with the standard Windows CHKDSK test with the proper switches.
Anyone with more info on this chime in please.

Such HDD integrity tests should probably run in any drive, new or used, but again one must know how to run them reliably.

Would you mind posting a screenshot of the test you're running on Victoria? A single pass, sequential read test should not take a week on any properly functioning drive. I've never had a 16-18TB drive take even a day. A 10TB drive would likely be around 17 hours.

I disagree with your comment that one should not run these tests unless they fully understand what they're doing. The standard read tests are non-destructive. The biggest problem is people misinterpreting the results, which can happen with basically any of these HD utilities.

For the purposes of testing a drive, I would not mess with the default timeout. If that setting does what I think it does (I can't find any English documentation), you generally wouldn't want to set it as low as 250ms. Yes, I think I know where you got that number but it was in regards to a totally different situation.

I'm not sure if it can be adjusted but I believe Victoria will normally log any blocks in the "orange" or worse range (which appears to be >1 second). HDDScan can be adjusted and defaults to reporting sectors >50ms. I think HDDScan's default is too low and Victoria's is a bit high. I prefer somewhere around 150-250ms. 8.33ms would absolutely not be an acceptable timeout. A timeout is a maximum. 8.33ms would be nearly optimal. Even very fast hard drives have random access times of roughly 10-20ms.

There are a few more factors that serve to muddy the water further. One is the block size. I'm not sure how these programs determine the default block size to test (probably based on the drive capacity) but it often does not align with the drive's physical or logical sector size. On a 12TB drive, Victoria selects a 2KB block size and HDDScan picks 1KB. The drives have 4K physical sectors and 512 byte logical sectors. It might be a good idea to bump the block size to 4KB, so they align with the drive's physical sector boundaries.

Now, here's a really important warning. Both of these programs run on Windows. Windows itself and other programs may attempt to access the drive, while the scan is running. This can often cause false positives for slow sectors. It can be hard to avoid this on a regular Windows installation. For this reason, I prefer to run these utilities from a live Windows PE session (using Hiren's BootCD PE). Unfortunately, this gets into areas too complicated for many people. My best advice for the average user is, if one of these programs logs slow sectors, run a couple additional scans and see if the same sectors come up slow. It doesn't have to be a whole drive scan, you can set the programs to check only portions of the drive. You'd want to start the rescan at least a little ways before the sectors in question.

If these tests are performed in a way that produces accurate results, you don't want to see ANY bad or weak/slow (say >250ms) sectors. The eBay ad for the drive in this deal explicitly highlights a drive with "perfect" surface scan results. In general, if a drive had even a hundred weak sectors, I'd classify it as failing. I don't think I've seen a drive with >20 bad/weak sectors where the damage wasn't spreading. Anything more than 0 is cause for concern.

BTW, the link you posted isn't really relevant to this discussion. It's a question based on a purely theoretical, ideal, and incomplete situation.

MWink
Have you bought a number of GOHARDRIVES 12tb drives , like in this thread ... and how many failed the tests that you performed on them. Was it like 20 percent failed. In my last shipment a few days ago 2 drives didn't INITALISE and of the 2 drives that Initalised ... one drive in SMART showed YELLOW CAUTION on it, and only 1 drive passed Smart and using HHD had 0 bad sectors at default settings on surface read mode (took about 14 hours).

What is your experience on these drives? Sounds like you have knowledge most of us don't have with these drives.

I see this 12Tb HD price increased by $10 to $90!

For the Victoria HD test I left everything at default. That's why I mentioned the 10,000 ms timeout.
I agree with you that even though the timeout is set that high there must be another criterion when this test is run since it picked up ms timeouts less than the 10,000 ms default setting at 9203 and 8532 ms.

Also, you must be right about Windows trying to access the drive causing erroneous slow/weak sectors. That may be the case here with these two high ms timeout results.

Also, I'm running these tests on a USB external HD enclosure, since I have only a couple of laptops, no SATA interface as these tests should be run, and that may affect this Victoria test in taking so long and perhaps providing erroneous results.
The CHKDSK tests that I did on both of these 10Tb drives took about 16 hours and both came back with NO bad sectors/clusters.
Both drives were formatted with the default NTFS 4K allocation unit size or block size before the CHKDSK and the Victoria tests were run.

The 8.33 ms timeout link I mentioned is of course ideal, and it was mentioned purely as relevant information.

I haven't run the HDDScan test yet.

Screenshots of the Victoria test currently running are posted.

You are right about Windows accessing the drive is causing erroneous slow/weak sectors.
The screenshot below with the third slow/weak sector was when the drive was accessed by Windows to see the SMART of the drive.
So, most likely the other two listed weak/slow sectors are erroneous too.

I don't presently have any drives purchased from goHardDrive but did ordered one. I have worked with manufacturer recertified drives from ServerPartDeals.

You said you had two drives that wouldn't initialize. Did you do anything to test them? Ideally, tests like HDDScan and Victoria should be run on uninitialized drives. Once they have been initialized (a partition table created), Windows will restrict some of the abilities of these programs (mainly their ability to directly write to the drive). That said, them failing to initialize is cause for concern.

What program showed a yellow caution warning? Do you know the details of the SMART report? The lack of industry standardization makes SMART values a nightmare to interpret. Many programs (and users) incorrectly interpret SMART information, especially on less common drives. However, these particular drives likely do have good support. If you have the actual SMART report, I'd be happy to take a look and give you my opinion. If you were using an updated version of CrystalDiskInfo, on a drive like this, a caution warning likely is cause for concern.

I see this 12Tb HD price increased by $10 to $90!

For the Victoria HD test I left everything at default. That's why I mentioned the 10,000 ms timeout.
I agree with you that even though the timeout is set that high there must be another criterion when this test is run since it picked up ms timeouts less than the 10,000 ms default setting at 9203 and 8532 ms.

Also, you must be right about Windows trying to access the drive causing erroneous slow/weak sectors. That may be the case here with these two high ms timeout results.

Also, I'm running these tests on a USB external HD enclosure, since I have only a couple of laptops, no SATA interface as these tests should be run, and that may affect this Victoria test in taking so long and perhaps providing erroneous results.
The CHKDSK tests that I did on both of these 10Tb drives took about 16 hours and both came back with NO bad sectors/clusters.
Both drives were formatted with the default NTFS 4K allocation unit size or block size before the CHKDSK and the Victoria tests were run.

The 8.33 ms timeout link I mentioned is of course ideal, and it was mentioned purely as relevant information.

I haven't run the HDDScan test yet.

Screenshots of the Victoria test currently running are posted.

You are right about Windows accessing the drive is causing erroneous slow/weak sectors.
The screenshot below with the third slow/weak sector was when the drive was accessed by Windows to see the SMART of the drive.
So, most likely the other two listed weak/slow sectors are erroneous too.