I have two 2TB drives:
/dev/sde
WCD WD20EZRX-00D8PB0 Firmware revision 80.00A80 (new consumer-grade WD Green series)
/dev/sdf
WCD WD2002FYPS-01U1B1 Firmware revision 04.05G05 (old pro-grade server power-saving drive)
The first one (sde
) is brand new. I have used it only for a few days and it is formatted as ext4.
The second one (sdf
) has been used as a backup drive for a few years. It was almost full and ext4-formatted on top of lmv2.
Both drives are connected to the same SAS controller using the same cable and powered using the same cable (Silverstone PP06B-4SATA10). Two SAS drives also share those very same cables.
I am running the following commands on a idle 8-core workstation with 64GB of RAM:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX iflag=nocache oflag=direct bs=4096
For sde the process has completed after 54329.1 seconds at a speed of 36.8 MB/s.
For sdf the process is still running (after 354117 seconds) at a speed of 4.8 MB/s (as reported after kill -USR1
).
This means that the very same command takes nearly 8 times more in the old server drive than in the new consumer drive.
Both are "IntelliPower" drives with 64MB cache and it is true that the newer one is expected to be somehow faster (maybe twice as fast, being generous, but 8 times?)
QUESTIONS
- Is this to be expected given the features of the drives or might it have something to do with age, corruption, formatting, fullness, power, priority, buggy firmware, etc?
- Do you think this could be a symptom of hardware malfunction?
- Should I replace the old drive?
UPDATE
Following @MKzero suggestion, I run smartctl and, indeed, it would seem that the drive is kaput. However, when I run smartctl dd was still running...
smartctl -H /dev/sdf
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.12-1-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
Failed Attributes:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 138 138 140 Pre-fail Always FAILING_NOW 490