I have a WD blue hard drive and its chugging for now but freezes from time to time. Looked online cant find a noob friendly way to see what values mean in the smart data. I see worst and threshold. and the value is above or equal to those value sometimes and I’m confused. Would love to have a simple explanation of what they mean and how do i know when to replace the drive or be pointed to one.
This is my hard drive. The smartctl data dump
P.S. if I am posting this and there is a topic about this or I did something wrong let me know. I’m new and not 100% confident I’m doing this right.
I’d say it would probably be good to start replacing that drive.
As for the drive “freezing” I’m not sure what that would be but could be a power issue as @hem suggested but it could just be the drive itself. Start with replacing the drive and also make sure that your PSU puts out enough power for your rig. You could use a PSU calculator like Newegg’s if you’re not sure what sort of power draw each component takes.
This is likely to be because the drive is attempting error recovery. If it fails to read, it will go back and attempt it over and over again, trying slightly different track offsets and slightly different error recovery codes.
That’s one of the primary differences between regular and enterprise or NAS drives. Drives used in an array give up almost immediately and report the error so it can be recovered from the other array drives.
A WD Blue can keep retrying for 30 seconds or so. And if there are multiple bad blocks this means the system can come to a halt for hours.
What you want to read are the RAW values. Those are in most cases in hex so if you want a “real” value you need to convert them from hex to dec.
From what I read in your values, you should replace the drive.
depending on the drive (spinning rust) some drives will click excessively or you will hear excessive seeking of the read write heads, windows blue screen or black screen of death,
sector failure messages, controller failure messages, and smart drive error messages.
smart drive error messages will occur when the imbedded program detects too many errors in the read rate, and will display nag messages about the drive failing soon.
you usually have a little time to get another drive but thats not always the case, especially if some of the errors are in the boot sector.