A couple months back one of my rigs died, and i salvaged a WD green 500GB from it. (it was 99% sure a motherboard issue) I was curious if the drive would work as a "mass storage" in my home server, so i put it in, and tried to format to ext4 (for linux offcourse). The first 3 or 4 attempts it failed to format completely, so i decided to revert to its original NTFS.
The drive is throwing A LOT of smart errors, and lubuntu gives me startup warnings about soon-to-happen drive failure which i chose to auto-ignore. Drive benchmarks were as expected for an older hard drive, and are pretty much identical to the other hard drive in the system.
A bit later I decided to retry formatting to ext4, this time, with luck. Again the drive benchmarks were as usual. Until about a week later the hard drive corrupted, and became unreadable, reformatting as ext4 failed, reformatting as NTFS works.
Today (about 6 months later) I was cleaning up the home server and noticed the drive was still working as expected, without any errors. Drive benchmark is as usual.
I know its most likely impossible to fix, and the drive is probably on its last legs, but i'm curious how its possible a hard drive works on one file system, and doesnt on an other.
-- I have no clue how old the drive actually is, but it has 1 year, 2 months of power up time, and 3950 power-on events --