[aklug] Re: hard drive issues

What are people saying SMART does poorly?

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Jim Gribbin <jimgribbin@gmail.com> wrote:
> Have you tried "ddrescue"? Not dd_rescue, different tool.
>
> I did look up S Gibson's Spinrite after our discussions on it and
> smartmon tools. I see that Spinrite appears to make extensive use of the
> drive's SMART stuff.
>
> I'm curious as to what recent experiences people on the list may have
> had with smartmontools? When I tried googling stuff about SMART, there
> seemed to be some complaints, sort of, that SMART didn't work very well
> and couldn't be relied on. The stuff I found though was a couple of
> years old, so I'm curious about more recent experiences.
>
> How about experiences w/ Spinrite?
>
> This came up after I mentioned changing out a drive because Fedora 10
> installed the smartmon tools daemon by default on my laptop w/ a used
> harddrive. After smartmon complained about excessive errors for a couple
> of days, I changed out the drive and smartmon's messages went away.
>
> Some thought I gave up on the drive to easily. I thought the problems
> smartmon was telling me made sense when added to another issue I had had
> occasionally with the previous install on that drive. It was as if small
> amounts of data would occasionally disappear.
>
> I don't think I remembered to mention it Friday, but when smartmon's
> complaints got irritating enough, I googled the drive in question (a
> Samsung laptop drive) and it seemed to have a reputation for problems
> along the lines of what smartmon was complaining about.
>
> On Sat, 2009-10-03 at 23:39 -0800, Greg Madden wrote:
>> A few cosmic convergences happening with my IDE storage.
>> 1. I have hda & hdb, both loose DMA settings reliably.
>> 2. Smartmontools 'smartctl' reports a high count :
>> 'Raw_Read_Error_Rate', 'Seek_Error_Rate', fortunately? the
>> 'Hardware_ECC_Recovered' equals the 'Raw_Read_Error_Rate'.
>>
>> =A0The 'Reallocated_Sector_Ct' is at zero which means that, afaikt, that
>> nothing is physically happening, yet. Also the 'Current_Pending_Sector'
>> & 'Offline_Uncorrectable' count is zero.
>> It should be noted that the smartmon stuff reports errors but does not
>> fix them.
>>
>> 3. It was mentioned Friday Nite the Steve Gibson's 'Spinrite' tools
>> fixes magnetic media issues. Unwilling to spend $89 on a 'black box' sol=
ution
>> I found the tools in Linux that do the same.
>> http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/badblockhowto.html
>>
>> A brief list of tools:
>> smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda
>> smartctl -A /dev/hda
>> fdisk -lu /dev/hda
>> Tune2fs -l /dev/hda3 | grep Block
>> debugfs, cool tool .
>> and "dd'
>>
>> A quick fix :'e2fsck with, at least, the -c option,
>> which uses 'badblocks' and moves data, remaps bad blocks :-)
>>
>> Google is full of hits on the results of SMART enabled drives. Me
>> thinks it causes much wasted time and anxiety. I mention this because
>> the new Ubuntu 9.10 is using a new hard drive health tool that pops up
>> on every boot telling the user that the hard drive is ABOUT to fail.
>>
>> I am maybe a litle closer to understanding hard drive issues :-) =A0I
>> have renewed interest in backups.
>>
>> ps, I used the 'System Rescue Cd' on an Ext4 partition.
>>
>>
>
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Received on Mon Oct 5 07:41:21 2009