HTWingNut

Well when your PC holds your USB device hostage for no apparent reason (looking at you, Windows), sometimes you have to just yank it.

How is it formatted? NTFS? ExFAT? BTRFS?

Haha, I felt the same vibe.

2TB? Why so small? Go big or go home.

WD Blue 8TB is a CMR drive and just as good as any NAS drive. But I'd avoid any consumer grade hard drives 8TB and under:

• Seagate Barracuda / Barracuda Compute
• WD Blue (except 8TB)
• WD Red (Red Plus and Red Pro are fine tho)
• Toshiba DT02
• Toshiba P300

Except it's not always the case. I had a few WD Elements/Easystores that I had data on, shucked them, and couldn't read them in Windows. It wasn't encrypted, just something funky done with the partitioning and couldn't use it until I destroyed existing and created new partitions.

But it can't hurt to try it first, you should be able to throw it back in the enclosure to get access to the data, although good idea to have a backup anyhow.

There is no such thing as "RAID 5" with Storage Spaces, it's just "Storage Spaces with Parity"

You will have to set up your appropriate columns and block size using Powershell. I don't have any links handy but start searching up Storage Spaces Columns Powershell.

I made several attempts and never got it working well. It's honestly best left to Enterprise setups who know wtf they're doing. That, and I'm not too bright either, so maybe that's a problem too. LOL.

There is no published TBW for the disk that I can tell. You'd have to ask Kingston. And even then most SSD's can write 10x the TBW without failure.

I don't see if it's TLC or QLC or its rated TBW. Why not search up reviews of the SSD?

The good news is that there's no reallocated sectors. However, 2E5 is 741 decimal value, which is a lot of pending sectors, I'd be surprised if they weren't bad sectors, and more to follow. I wouldn't trust it to safely retain any data. Backup your data immediately.

If you want to try to see how bad it is, do a full format and see what happens with those pending sectors and uncorrectable sectors. They may go away completely or they may end up as reallocated sectors (attribute 05) in which case it is likely on its way out.

Either way it's a 500GB drive 10-12 years old. Replace it with a 1 or 2TB SSD and call it a day. A drive that old with that many power on hours has a very limited life remaining regardless.

4TB seagate barracuda HDD

Return it. It's SMR and trash. Go with Exos or Ironwolf or WD Red Plus/Pro, Gold, or Utlrastar.

Can I simply replace the 1TB drive with another 4TB drive in the future if needed?

Generally yes, it is not an issue, but depends on the RAID config you use.

If it's files you work with daily like for video or media editing, then a local SSD is best. But if it's for streaming music, movies, or even just Microsoft Office type documents, a NAS is much better.

You can set it up with redundancy as well as a way to scan and scrub your disks and data regularly to ensure they are healthy. But also have a regular backup either in the cloud, another NAS, or external drive.

3-2-1 backup rule exists to avoid the situation you're in.