Storage Solutions Problem with WD 4TB drive which does not have SMART

6pack

ex-Mod
Bought this - https://www.amazon.in/Passport-Portable-External-Drive-Yellow/dp/B01LQQHBLM/ 4 months back.

Was facing copying problems from it few days back when the drive is almost 3.5TB full. Copy and paste speeds are around 4MBps to and from the drive now.

I was thinking drive got bad sectors and tried to do a SMART test in linux and got no SMARt capabilites error in 3 different programs - Gparted, Disks and GDisks which uses smartctl as backend. Other drives - external and internal have SMART in them in same programs.

So is WD pushing out drives without any SMART in them? I wonder if these are refurb or recycled drives? no other reason to hide smart data. Thing is now I don't know if there are any bad sectors on this drive since no smart on it. Gparted says 0 bad sectors after i did a file test on it.

Another thing is just trying to write data to it makes the nuc hit 100% cpu limit for hours. Unmounting the drive took 30 minutes at 100% cpu usage. No doubt the drive is at its limit. Weirdly I can access everything on the drive and I'll have to buy another 4TB drive to get things off this one to send it in for rma. Problem is how do i rma this if there are no bad sectors and no smart data?

I will take a screen shot of no smart attributes later when i get time.
 
Try it on a windows machine with program like HDTune? Maybe the HDD has incompatible smart for linux smartctl program? (I know - sounds unlikely)
 
i don't have any windows machine though. maybe i'll check it in some neighbours house some day when i and they have time or they call me for troubleshooting their pc.

Problem is i've formatted it in ext4 though. i don't want windows trying to delete or initialize the disk which it tries to do with ext3/4 or other disk formats. what a dumb os.

good thing that wd has 3 years warranty on this. lets hope i can copy off all data before the drive fails.
 
Code:
smartctl 6.6 2016-05-31 r4324 [x86_64-linux-4.15.0-45-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               WD
Product:              My Passport 25E2
Revision:             4005
Compliance:           SPC-4
User Capacity:        4,000,752,599,040 bytes [4.00 TB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Physical block size:  4096 bytes
LU is resource provisioned, LBPRZ=0
Rotation Rate:        5400 rpm
Form Factor:          2.5 inches
Serial number:        [removed]
Device type:          disk
Local Time is:        Mon Feb 11 00:31:40 2019 IST
SMART support is:     Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
Current Drive Temperature:     0 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        0 C

Error Counter logging not supported

No self-tests have been logged

Device does not support Background scan results logging

smartctl 6.6 2016-05-31 r4324 [x86_64-linux-4.15.0-45-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org


WD4TBMyPassport-noSMART-2.png
 
Nice find. I wonder what program was used to find out that raw data showing hidden fields. WD sucks now. Deliberately hiding important info from end users.
 
Try hd sentinel tool windows or hdregenerator but it requires to boot into cmd mode.
Better grab Hiren boot which have some good set of tools for in depth info+benchmarking.
 
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