TIL that most of my backup drives were actually failing silently for over a year

Back in February I was swapping out a client's old server at a dental office in Springfield. Pulled a WD Red from 2018 and threw it in my test rig. CrystalDiskInfo showed like 3000 reallocated sectors but the drive was still passing SMART in their Dell. Nobody had looked at it in 18 months. Three of their six backup drives had the same issue. Now I check raw SMART values on every single drive I touch. Has anyone else noticed how often enterprise gear hides drive failures?

2 comments

2 Comments

cameron_palmer27d ago

Were you able to see any mismatch between what the Dell iDRAC reported and what you read from the drives directly? Curious if the enterprise controller was actively masking the failures or just not polling that data.

the_kai27d ago

Tbh that's a really good question and it's been bothering me for a while. I actually saw a big mismatch in my setup where iDRAC would show all drives as healthy but smartctl directly on the drives would show pending sector counts and reallocated sectors. The controller was definitely hiding stuff from iDRAC, not just skipping the check. It felt like Dell's firmware was filtering out warnings that would have triggered a service call. That's frustrating because you think you have clean drives but they're quietly dying on you. I've had to start doing direct drive checks every month just to catch what iDRAC misses.