IronWolf not reallocating sectors if it finds suspicious sectors?

[Mumintroll]

I have an Ironwolf 4tb in my regular home pc. I choose Ironwolf because it's said to have better reliability than the Barracuda drives. It's not an Ironwolf Pro, but a "regular" Ironwolf.

I've read that it's primarly meant to put into a NAS with a RAID controller.

 

Now I have stumbled across an old forum thread from Quora stating that harddrives made for NAS are lacking some built-in features that "regular" harddrives have when it comes to handle suspicious sectors.

 

A regular harddrive would try to read the suspicious sector several times and if successfull reading it will relocate the data to a spare sector, then mark the suspicious sector as perhaps a bad sector or current pending sector.

 

However a NAS harddrive would lack this feature and if it finds a suspicious sector it will directly mark it as bad and not try to retrieve any data there. For that you need the NAS drive in a RAID controller.

 

Now I know how much weird and false info are circulating around the net. But I don't know enough about NAS drives if this is true, and I don't know if my Ironwolf 4tb (ST4000VN006-3CW104) is considired as a NAS drive or just a high-end regular harddrive. I did chat with Seagate's live agents support service but I didn't get a clear answer really... Can anyone of you give a correct answer? 

 

Here's the link on Quora (that gave me a hiccup), it's the post that someone named Kenneth Durham made.

Can a NAS HDD be used in a desktop? Read description. - Quora

 

A part of his postat Quora:

"All of the major harddrive makers have responded by creating a series of drives that do not perform any sector reallocation internally. These drives do not have any type of data protection and recovery system built into them because they are explicitly intended to be used only with a RAID controller. That is the primary difference in what are sold as NAS harddrives.

So, what happens if we connect a NAS harddrive to a desktop computer? Initially, it will work just fine. But, as the drive ages and naturally experiences read errors, it will not be able to recover the data at all. You will experience data corruption and data loss. This is unavoidable when you use a drive that has no mechanism to protect your data against expected read errors."

 

For those recommending me to replace it with an SSD instead: Yes I will eventually, whenever I can afford it. The larger SSDs are still much more expensive than harddrives so I'll have to wait until I can.

And yes I do make backups of my important stuff.

I got my Ironwolf in october last year and so far no errors reported yet.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Are you having any issues with your specific drive? I'd just keep using and not worry about it. If the drive acts up, restore backups.

 

From all I know NAS drives have a different timeout if the drive has issues that's shorter than desktop drives to keep raid cards happy. 

 

I haven't seen any good evidence that a NAS drive is more reliable, so I'd just get desktop drives next time(but at 4TB I'd really just get a SSD with prices these days).

[Mumintroll]

Ok so I have contacted their live agent support again and got some more clear answers...

Apparently everything from that forum post at Quora I mentioned is true. NAS drives doesn't usually have that built-in sector reallocation feature. If the harddrive finds a suspicious sector it won't try to reallocate it, it'll just mark is as bad and move on, and so the data will get corrupted.

 

Both Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro series are NAS harddrives and they lack this sector reallocation feature.

So it's actually not recommended to put an Ironwolf into a regular home pc.

 

I'm so sad and angry about this piece of information!

Ironwolf drives are marketed as more robust, more reliable, more anti-vibration and so on. And the regular Ironwolf doesn't explicity be marketed as a NAS drive but mostly as a high end harddrive. 

And that NAS drives generally lack this sector reallocation feature is not a common knowlegde. In many other forums people tend to give thumbs up for Ironwolf and recommend them over the regular consumer harddrives.

 

I guess I'll be looking for an ssd soon to replace it....

[Mumintroll]

On 3/5/2024 at 11:06 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Are you having any issues with your specific drive? I'd just keep using and not worry about it. If the drive acts up, restore backups.

 

From all I know NAS drives have a different timeout if the drive has issues that's shorter than desktop drives to keep raid cards happy. 

 

I haven't seen any good evidence that a NAS drive is more reliable, so I'd just get desktop drives next time(but at 4TB I'd really just get a SSD with prices these days).

I don't have any problems yet, but as I've now found out it's missing the sector reallocation feature.

I'll look for an ssd.

[kokosnh]

it’s not like you can always read bad sector, and such sector is relocated, without the data. 
sometimes you can, sometimes you can't.

if HDD do have even one bad sector ( even if relocated ), I do not trust it anymore, and it can do only secondary backups, or refs file system.

So lack of that feature isn't really something I care.

 

and what’s the alternative, buy standard barracuda SMR drives, no thank you.

[Electronics Wizardy]

On 3/6/2024 at 2:06 PM, Mumintroll said:

I don't have any problems yet, but as I've now found out it's missing the sector reallocation feature.

I'll look for an ssd.

NAS drives will still reallocate bad sectors, but they have a different time out to keep raid cards happy. 

 

If the drive works I wouldn't touch it. Keep backups of the drive so your data stays safe. No drive is perfect, and any drive can fail at any time with no warning.