Odd WD Purple Behaviour

[MontysEvilTwin]

I have a 2TB WD Purple (WD20PURX-64P6ZY0) which I have been testing in a HDR-FOX for the last week. there has been some confusion as to whether this model is suitable for use in a PVR. Recent discussions (see here) indicate that it is not the best choice.
I have already noticed some odd behaviour. Last night the unit was taking about 10 minutes to go into standby. Looking in 'Web-If>Diagnostics>Hard Disk' showed no problems, but due to a bug this page only presented limited SMART statistics. After 'fixing' the bug (thanks prpr) I got an alert: line 198 in the attributes table was showing an 'Offline_Uncorrectable' sector. I booted into maintenance mode and ran fix-disk. I quickly got the option to reallocate the sector. I selected yes and was told that this had been done successfully. However, I kept being asked if I wanted to correct the same sector again. After a few tries, I said no. Fix-disk proceeded with a couple of additional steps but then seemed to stall, doing nothing for an hour or so. I eventually rebooted from telnet. After booting, the entry in line 198 of the SMART table was now zero, but with no corresponding reallocated sector in line 5. I booted into maintenance mode and ran fix-disk again. This ran to completion without any bad sectors or filesystem errors reported.
I left the unit switched on for a couple of hours afterwards. On checking 'Web-If>Diagnostics>Hard Disk' again it showed that the short offline disk check had been running repeatedly (14 times in 2 hours) all by itself. I rebooted again and this has now stopped. The unit is now behaving normally. I think I will stop the test and reinstall the Seagate Pipeline. The WD purple is only about 3 months old. Do you think it is reasonable to return it as faulty?

 

[prpr]

due to a bug this page only presented limited SMART statistics. After 'fixing' the bug (thanks prpr)

That's fixed with 1.2.4-2 I believe.

 

[Andy Hurley]

I made the mistake of ordering the 1TB WD Purple for my HDR as well. It seems to function ok (still in the first week of use) but I have had some odd behaviour. For example yesterday I had trouble with my broadband (no internet access for several hours) and the HDR locked up (no data recorded by sysmon) until I power cycled it. Then, later in the evening it just decided to reboot while we were watching live TV. It came up cleanly and has behaved since but I am getting concerned that the drive is problematic.

 

[sceptic]

No issues here with a 2TB HDD so far. My power on hours is currently 1162, I'll be keeping a close eye on it!

 

[MontysEvilTwin]

To add to the above post, I left the unit on today and the drive started doing short disk checks again, albeit less regularly than before. I used the following command to list the SMART parameters and features (drive is mounted as 'sdb'):

smartctl -a /dev/sdb

A feature called 'Auto offline data collection' was enabled on this drive (this is disabled by default on Seagate Pipelines) so I turned it off:

smartctl --offlineauto=off /dev/sdb

This worked and the setting survives a reboot. Unfortunately this did not stop the drive running the disk checks. I finally cracked it by sending an abort command:

smartctl --abort /dev/sdb

I've rebooted a couple of times since and the unit finally seems to have stopped running the disk tests. I don't know why it started doing them though.