December 31st, 2017, 17:15
January 7th, 2018, 0:32
January 7th, 2018, 18:01
January 7th, 2018, 18:35
On WD (modern ROYL) drives it's not recommended to run with pending sectors as if the pending list (RE-LO) grows too big there are chances for the drive to slow down considerably.... to the point of the data to get inacessible.
If you transfer all data out of the 320GB drive and you confirm that the data is securly saved ...
... you can try to zero fill the drive or secure erase it in order to re-use the pending sectors or force them to go to the G-List and be swapped by spares.
January 8th, 2018, 23:09
Very old WD drives did had a WDC MCU. Latest WD drives with WDC MCU were Arch-VI Cyl 32 and they were then replaced with Marvell MCU. The first WD drives on the market with Marvell MCU did had a slight diferent firmware than "modern" ROYL. There are just a bunch of families on the market that were Marvell based an NOT ROYL. You can identify ROYL drives by checking the modules of the firmware. Here : - http://yura.puslapiai.lt/files/wd/mhdd/wd_royl_rom.html but any recent WD drive that you will encounter will be ROYL.
There is NO FIX for the slow issue. Once the drive starts to have problems then the drive MUST be replaced. Even ARCO / SELF-SCAN can't be considered a very reliable way to fix the drive. There is a "patch" that simply disable media scan for bad sectors and clear the re-lo list. This is to make the drive fast again in order to RECOVER THE DATA. This is NOT for drive re-use.
No hardware tool required and it's NOT that advanced ... It's quite simple honestly.
Again if you have "pro" tools like PC-3000 DE when you clone a drive you can see what blocks are bad and what files belong to those blocks.
Regarding cloning of bad drives if heads are dying it might be worth to go after the files you need first and only then attempt to clone the rest of the drive....
One VERY IMPORTANT consideration about the "slow issue" on WD drives and the "Pending BUG" on the Seagate ones is that on modern drives there is a BACKGROUND MEDIA SCAN meaning that you might have your drive idle doing nothing, your OS might not be requesting any data from the drive, might not be sending any command or in fact you might even get the SATA cable disconnected from the host and the drive itself while powered up might be scanning the surface for sectors that can't be properly read and be adding those sectors to the pending list. You don't even need to request to "read" or "verify" a problematic LBA, the drive might do that itself at firmware level unless you disable the correspondent "feature" by patching firmware .....
January 8th, 2018, 23:33
Use your firmware tool and get a copy of all modules, place them on a safe place.
This is due to a problem similar with the Seagate F3 drives, when the drive gets "stuck" trying to re-locate sectors, or more specific, adding and managing the list of sectors that are "candidates" to be relocated. [...]
This operation is somehow correspondent to turning off relocation of Seagate F3 drives
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