[aklug] Re: hard drive issues

The only stuff I found on Google was circa 2004/2005 and discounted it
because of how many years ago it was, but a couple of people at FriLinux
seemed to think the situation was unchanged.

Hard drive manufacturers were being lumped in with wireless router
manufacturers like Linksys in the way that they put out firmware
upgrades for their routers that don't fix the problems they claim to
fix, but you go to something like dd-wrt (ala, Greg and his recent
experiences with a WRT-54G Linksys) and the problems do go away. They
were reluctant to believe the hard drive manufacturers had ever actually
done anything to fix the SMART issues of a few years ago.

My first experiences w/ drives making use of SMART are fairly recent so
I'm not certain where I actually stand on it.

I did have a similar experience with a WRT-54 (no G) last year, so I can
sympathize. It kept dropping everyone and would have to be restarted.
Foolish me, one of the few times it didn't occur to me to Google the
situation first. I had put in all the mfg firmware upgrades that were
available, but the problem didn't go away. I decided the hardware was
bad and trashed it. I later tripped across information on the web that
these routers were known for this in spite of firmware upgrades and the
cure was ... wait for it ... dd-wrt (or similar).

If one looks at the Spinrite documentation, they speak of making quite a
bit of use of SMART in diagnosing the drive.

The number of hours SMART said my drive had run didn't exactly make
sense and may have been getting misreported, but the overall situation
seemed to match up and make sense.

On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 07:41 -0800, Shane Spencer wrote:
> 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'.
> >>
> >> The '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' solution
> >> 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 :-) I
> >> have renewed interest in backups.
> >>
> >> ps, I used the 'System Rescue Cd' on an Ext4 partition.
> >>
> >>
> >
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> >
> >

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Received on Tue Oct 6 13:05:49 2009