External drive throwing ATA errors. What's the issue?

Question

I have an SSD in my system and an external hard drive (attached via eSATA) as a backup medium. I use "rsync" to synchronize the internal drive to the external drive. My backup drive was once a Seagate ST1000LM024. The problem is, I always got file system corruption on the drive, either the file-system became read-only or was full of empty directories or even the superblock was damaged. When I formatted the drive, I could sometimes use it again, though it would fail again soon. In the end, I couldn't even format the drive anymore.

I thought that the drive was bad (even though it didn't show any SMART errors) and replaced it with a more pricy Western Digital WD10JPVX.

After I replaced the drive, I could use the new one for several months, then corruption started to appear on the new drive as well. I formatted it again and got it back to a working state. Today it failed again. I formatted it, but it failed on the first pass of new data written to it. So I thought it might be a problem related to "rsync", perhaps it's writing lots of data in parallel and the drive "hiccups" on that. So I went with ordinary "cp" for copying the data to it. It went well for quite some time, then it failed again.

In my opinion, the SMART data doesn't look too suspicious.

# smartctl -a /dev/sdc
smartctl 6.4 2015-06-04 r4109 [x86_64-linux-4.4.6-300.fc23.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-15, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Blue Mobile
Device Model:     WDC WD10JPVX-22JC3T0
Serial Number:    [removed]
LU WWN Device Id: [removed]
Firmware Version: 01.01A01
User Capacity:    1.000.204.886.016 bytes [1,00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5400 rpm
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 1.5 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Apr 12 18:42:47 2016 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x00) Offline data collection activity
                    was never started.
                    Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Self-test execution status:      (   0) The previous self-test routine completed
                    without error or no self-test has ever 
                    been run.
Total time to complete Offline 
data collection:        (17640) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities:            (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
                    Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
                    Suspend Offline collection upon new
                    command.
                    Offline surface scan supported.
                    Self-test supported.
                    Conveyance Self-test supported.
                    Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities:            (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
                    power-saving mode.
                    Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability:        (0x01) Error logging supported.
                    General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine 
recommended polling time:    (   2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time:    ( 198) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time:    (   5) minutes.
SCT capabilities:          (0x7035) SCT Status supported.
                    SCT Feature Control supported.
                    SCT Data Table supported.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   180   174   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       1991
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       57
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       14
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       33
191 G-Sense_Error_Rate      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       30
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       44
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   109   094   000    Old_age   Always       -       38
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       1
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
No self-tests have been logged.  [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]

SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
 SPAN  MIN_LBA  MAX_LBA  CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
    1        0        0  Not_testing
    2        0        0  Not_testing
    3        0        0  Not_testing
    4        0        0  Not_testing
    5        0        0  Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
  After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.
#

However, dmesg shows lots of these ...

[12609.913805] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x700000 SErr 0x400100 action 0x6 frozen
[12609.913817] ata4.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error
[12609.913824] ata4: SError: { UnrecovData Handshk }
[12609.913832] ata4.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
[12609.913843] ata4.00: cmd 61/00:a0:00:29:ad/08:00:09:00:00/40 tag 20 ncq 1048576 out
                        res 40/00:b4:00:60:ad/00:00:09:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[12609.913849] ata4.00: status: { DRDY }
[12609.913853] ata4.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
[12609.913863] ata4.00: cmd 61/00:a8:00:20:ad/09:00:09:00:00/40 tag 21 ncq 1179648 out
                        res 40/00:b4:00:60:ad/00:00:09:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[12609.913867] ata4.00: status: { DRDY }
[12609.913871] ata4.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
[12609.913880] ata4.00: cmd 61/00:b0:00:60:ad/09:00:09:00:00/40 tag 22 ncq 1179648 out
                        res 40/00:b4:00:60:ad/00:00:09:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[12609.913885] ata4.00: status: { DRDY }

Anyone knows what's the problem here and what I should do? I don't feel safe without a working backup drive.

This is on a Fedora 23 system with Kernel 4.4.6-300. There might be some more recent version, however, I actually wanted to back that thing up before applying the latest updates, which is why I ran into these problems in the first place.

Answer 1

Alright, seems this was actually a controller-related issue. I hooked the drive up to an older controller. It's operating considerably slower now, but so far it had a full sync (from being formatted) without a dropout.

Sure I'll keep an eye on this drive, but I think it's alright. Probably even the old Seagate drive that I replaced was ok and was just running on a faulty controller.

This is a weird issue, but well ...