HGST WinDFT Question -- While I wait . . . and wait . . .

[BonzaiDuck]

Anyone who has seen my recent posts on a certain model of Hitachi enterprise refurbed disks should know this is my latest development in the saga.

I suddenly began to have client backup failures occurring on my Win Server 2012 R2 Essentials system that I just finished configuring this last month. Checking my event logs, I discovered that a disk error was occurring on one of the $50 "bargain" Hitachis I purchased, mentioned in someone's thread about a recent high capacity UltraStar "He" drive.

Stablebit Scanner "SMART" info display shows an uncorrected sector count of 1. In other cases I'd seen discussed in forums, people had a lot more of these. CrystalDiskInfo also shows a "warning" about the disk. I can't be sure that the error cannot be repaired. But I swapped it out and replaced it with a 3TB Seagate Barracuda.

Running the Client Backup repair tool available through the 2012 R2 E Dashboard, the scheduled backups are again running properly. If I can start and complete a backup on any workstation as a "Manual Backup," I must assume they'll pass muster when they are again executed according to schedule.

Now I'm testing the offending Hitachi disk using the HGST WinDFT utility. I was perhaps a bit too eager to run the "Erase" function, and I can see this is going to take some time.

Just to be sure, I'm asking anyone -- will this "erase" feature of the utility leave me with a disk that can again be initialized, partitioned and formatted? I hope the utility doesn't destroy the disk!

Anyway -- "refurbished" disks -- lesson learned.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Here's an UPDATE. As I said, I swapped the Hitachi drive with a warning in CrystalDiskInfo for a Barracuda 3TB. And I was erasing the Hitachi with WinDFT.

Then, I reformatted the disk.

Running CrystalDiskInfo, the offending SMART attribute again showed no errors, CDI shows "Good". I think it's possible you could get a warning in SMART that could be corrected with CHKDSK or some other procedure. Maybe the drive hasn't gone south after all.

I've seldom had to deal with these sorts of troubles, so I'm a bit uncertain where this leads. Do I, I wonder, have a damaged drive? Or just a drive that was temporarily damaged by some unfortunate combination of choices and events?

I should've made note of the attribute. I'm certain that it was either "Current Pending Sector Count," or "Uncorrectable Sector Count." It is now as if the drive has a clean bill of health from CrystalDiskInfo.