OT? Moving NAS Drive To PC?

[(PeteCresswell)]

I am guessing that drives on the NAS' hardware comparability list
are somehow engineered so that they are suitable for RAID use.

The drive currently in question is a Seagate ST32000542AS, which
has about 15,000 hours of power-on time and whose bad sector
count has started to increase rapidly (currently 173) in the past
couple of days.

This drive was purchased for NAS use, but had been migrated to
use as a PC desktop drive (for storing recorded TV shows).

The Question:

Is there any reason not to migrate such drives to desktop use?
i.e. is this just an isolated case of a bad drive, or am I trying
to fool Mother Nature by using these drives as desktop drives?

 

[Paul]

I am guessing that drives on the NAS' hardware comparability list
are somehow engineered so that they are suitable for RAID use.

The drive currently in question is a Seagate ST32000542AS, which
has about 15,000 hours of power-on time and whose bad sector
count has started to increase rapidly (currently 173) in the past
couple of days.

This drive was purchased for NAS use, but had been migrated to
use as a PC desktop drive (for storing recorded TV shows).

The Question:

Is there any reason not to migrate such drives to desktop use?
i.e. is this just an isolated case of a bad drive, or am I trying
to fool Mother Nature by using these drives as desktop drives?

On WD drives, a useful feature is TLER. And I learned reading this,
that Seagate may refer to it as ERC (or, use no term like that at all).
WD used to charge more, for drives that might be mechanically similar,
but have TLER adjustment in the firmware (for people who want to use
the drives in RAID arrays).

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/RAID-Issues-ERC/m-p/54082

Basically, no matter what it's called, in a RAID application, you don't
want a drive to spend 15 or 20 seconds trying to revive a sector.
Instead, the response is "truncated" to a shorter time constant.
The drive gives up on a sector, in less time. The purpose of this,
is to avoid the short time constant used by the RAID controller
or soft-RAID, in declaring a drive is "offline". Enabling TLER,
the array should drop out less (but, perhaps the reallocated
sector count grows faster as well).

So, if you'd adjusted the drive for RAID usage, you might consider
adjusting it back to desktop conditions. The drive is likely to be
continually declaring more and more reallocated sectors, so such
a settings change won't help with that. I have no idea, what the
timeout constant is for a vanilla Windows disk controller driver.

Paul