Theres a plague going around my network. At seemingly random my wd green and my wd blue drives have 200 uncorrectable sectors both within a few months of each other. It now takes one 30+ minutes to boot and the other wont boot into anything but safe mode. The wd green has 5644 hours on it the wd blue has 6522. What hard drives should i get? They are both in medium use systems, basically just chrome machines, but one does more gaming than the other.
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I have 6 refurbed Hitcahi Ultrastar 2TB drives in my server. Their power on time was something like 4 years when i plugged them in and they've been going strong for over 2 years. My advice: Go with Hitachi, and avoid Seagate like the plague.
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Time? Fall? half a dozen other things.
I am very curious if someone can answer this. It sounds weird.
I have the same drives just for data and they are still going strong way longer than they should be. I do daily backups and will lose nothing, so I am kinda experimenting to see just how long they will last.
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Manufacturing defects, dirt, heat and cosmic rays or other highly energetic particles are the usual cases.
I might make a guide soonish on how to hookup a serial terminal to a disk drive and manually remap sectors and bad blocks etc either to recover data or refurbish even the worst disk drive.
Think DIY PC-3000 
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Not sure if it is to do with this as he has a blue drive too, but green drives were failing due to the over active head parking they come with. Being green drives they were I tended for mostly off sometime running service an as such would park the heads often. People put them into regular service and then were surprised to see crazy stats out of S.M.A.R.T. about the number of head parks and resulting wear.
Worth looking into in this particular case, there were fixes for it I remember, never had a green drive just ran into this in passing.
Have you experimented with other drives as well? Maybe SSD? Also, does your choice of OS alter the result?
I don't know.
I have many types of drives. Intel 750 SSD for Windows, Samsung 850 Evo SSD - Steam, Crucial MX100 SSD - Games, WD Green - data, WD Red - nightly backup, WD Blues - external monthly backup. The WD Green isn't used too heavily and has some alarming SMART scores as @Zibob mentioned, but overall it reports as Good. It is 6 years old. I keep thinking about replacing it, but why? It is working perfectly, it's big enough and I have double backups, so I figure I can wait until it dies. The new Red (nightly) and 7 year old Blue (monthly) hardly get used at all.
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Checkout this thread:
Anything after 5 years is borrowed time. Dust comes to mind, but really I think the hardware just wears out over time, including enterprise. I've noticed that any NTFS based drives seem to have issues more often than not; I don't have evidence to support NTFS as causing sector issues though.
Portable drives almost always eventually have this issue for me. I think the constant moving/power on off kills them- which is why I mostly use old 120GB-250GB drives for portable.
I always consider any disk with bad sector number>0 as dying, and avoid using them.
Such disk might have very limited lifetime remaining (it is hard to tell what amount of time remains).
Long read operations (mentioned 30+ minutes) usually mean that HDD has problem with reading the sectors and does so until it success (and in such case sector data is reallocated). So if next start also takes so much time it means that it again need to move sectors (apart from increased fragmentation) - basically HDD is dying exponentially (and usually they do).
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Probably should mention that you should backup anything important if you haven't done so already
"Few months of each other" - I do not see anything here except coincidence.
For me, a few weeks from each other, would be a signal that there might be some other reason for that.
I always wonder in regards to the HDD, what happens when there is a small earth quake. In most cases HDD can accept some force (some vendors do automatic shutdown of the HDD to prevent damage - but usually it is only mentioned in regards to laptop HDDs). But I always assume that such situations might shorten the lifespan (by simply making the appearance of other defects sooner than later).
That sounds like what happened to my first SSD. I noticed it seemed sorta slow on boot and a test confirmed that. I didn't trust the SSD anymore and couldn't tolerate the massive slowdown, so I got a newer, bigger, better one and put the old SSD in an external enclosure. It died a week later. I felt really lucky that I replaced it just in time.
Are these 200 un-correctable sectors showing up in the same logical partitions of the drives? Were both the PC's the same OS -- perhaps same image you used to install?
I would look at power. Any brownouts or outright failures lately? Power cycling from a big draw (a/c). Even so, I would do a low level format on both, restore the data and see what happens. It could be only a couple of incidents and that will fix the issue or a harbinger of failure. Very tough to tell. I would expect the Green to fail first as an above poster said, it's being used outside of its performance envelope. The hours are nothing. I have drives of over 92,000 hrs. That's over 10 years but have less than 300 power on states. Yeah, I'm one of those guys who doesn't turn the machine off.
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Thanks for the help guys, much appreciated. I ended up buying a HGST 2tb drive and I found a Toshiba drive I was able to use. I wish I had more time to do some tests on the old drives to answer some questions but im incredibly busy and I leave Sunday to start my adventure in the Army.
I'd suggest trying out CrystalDiskInfo to check the status of each your disk's health, that's what I use