Can I reuse an overheated HDD after formatting in a ZFS RAID1?

Question

I have a WD50EFRX which overheated according to SMART data (95 degrees celsius) and damaged some blocks (raw value of Raw Read Error Rate ~ 22000). There're no other values besides the Raw Read Error Rate which indicate a failure and there's no indication that the overheating will happen again.

If I now format the disk and SMART knows all bad sectors and doesn't use them any more, could I use the device in a newly created ZFS pool with the overheated disk backed up by a working disk in a simple mirror or something more secure regarding disk failure?

I would use ZFS 0.6.3 on Linux 3.16.

Answer 1

If there are no remapped or pending sectors, your disk does not know about any defective sectors. It’s more likely that some other component involved in disk access is damaged, like the head or whatever.

That being said, I’m with the unRAID wiki on this:

PLEASE completely ignore the RAW_VALUE number! Only Seagates report the raw value, which yes, does appear to be the number of raw read errors, but should be ignored, completely. All other drives have raw read errors too, but do not report them, leaving this value as zero only. To repeat, Seagates are not worse than other drives because they appear to have raw read errors, rather they are the only one to report the number. I suspect that others do not report the number to avoid a lot of confusion, and questions for their tech support people. Seagate leaves those of us who provide tech support the job of answering the constant questions about this number. Hopefully now that you understand this, you will never bother a kind IT person with questions about the Raw_Read_Error_Rate RAW_VALUE again?

So yes, you can continue using the disk no problem. ZFS will evict it from the vdev if too many errors have occurred.