3TB Hard drive (wd red) healthy or dead?

[sdpagent]

I have a hard drive that reports 'SMART capable status BAD' at boot. But if I plug in the drive and run an extended smart test, it passed without errors see here

I am unable to see the volumes in Gparted (after plugging them in after OS loaded) but can see them in disk utility. I have been unable to run secure-erase or any formatting operations on them. Is there a clue in that output above? These drives are brand new and were in a software raid array, so whatever happened to the first obviously broke the second (exact same problem)

Stu

[TheFu]

I would run Boot-Info to gather data about the drive: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Info

That should help diagnose the root cause.

Always use parted or gparted with 12.04 or later releases for these large HDDs.

[sdpagent]

I am running ubuntu 12.04.
The devices are not picked up by gparted.
These drives are just holding data. There is no boot data on them. I boot from a separate drive.

Stu

[TheFu]

I am running ubuntu 12.04.
The devices are not picked up by gparted.
These drives are just holding data. There is no boot data on them. I boot from a separate drive.

Understood, but boot-info will dump information about the disk layout and flags too. I thought it would be helpful.

[tgalati4]

Time to start looking at cables, power connections, etc. It could be the drives just need breaking in.

If the drives are enumerated with

sudo fdisk -l

Then run badblocks on each drive. Capture the output, cut and paste into a notepad.

sudo badblocks /dev/sde1

If you get a lot of badblocks, then run again can mark them as bad in the filesystem:

sudo fsck -cc /dev/sde1

If your drive can't run badblocks, then you really do have a bad drive. Since these drives are new, I would return them. If they are out-of-specification, they will bite you in the future.

Do a search on your particular model number and see if others are having similar problems. Sometimes drive manufactures try to cut costs and use cheaper parts and catfood in their drives.

[oldfred]

I do not know RAID, but you cannot see RAID drives in gparted as it does not handle RAID.

Do not use gparted on RAID.
http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-res...-software-raid
Don't bother with RAID 0 unless you have a specific need for speed without data redundancy, since if one drive goes out, you lose the whole array.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
parted (3.0) completely removes filesystem creation and modification support, except for filesystem probing to determine what's in a partition.