Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Dale wrote: Hmmm, then I guess I didn't do something right the first time I tried cgdisk then. It said it wasn't aligned right but I couldn't figure out how to get it to do it. Then I used Gparted and it seemed to do it without me telling it anything. The only difference I saw was the little 1Mb partition. Well, I plan to dd the thing and start over with LVM and all so I'll see what it does next time. Maybe I just didn't do something right. Since I have nothing windoze on here, do I really need to worry about DOS booting? All I have is Gentoo here. Dale :-) :-) OK. I tested this drive pretty well and I think it is going to be OK. I ran the Smart test, copied over 800Gbs of data over, deleted it then copied it over again. After that I ran dd to put it back like new. I only did the first 100Gbs or so, not the whole thing. I then ran the Smart test again and it reported no problems. Then I set up LVM and such which leads me to one more question. Instead of making a partition, I just told LVM to use the whole disk. Just a bit ago, I realized that means it may not be doing this alignment thing since I did it this way. So, is it OK to leave it as is or should I go back and create a partition and tell LVM to use that? When I was copying the stuff over, I used dstat to monitor the speed. It was hitting right at 360Mbs a second at its peak when *writing* data. I'm only 3Gbs/sec here. Seems pretty fast to me. OK to leave it like it is or go back and create a partition? Thoughts? Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Wednesday 08 Aug 2012 13:53:22 Dale wrote: I don't use USB for drives, except the USB stick thingys. I have a question sort of related to this. Anyone can share info. I see boxes that hold drives in them and connect via ethernet or something like that. Do those work really well? I thought about getting one someday but I don't know what they do and how they do it EXACTLY. Is it like a small puter in there or some other means of getting the data across? Right now, I like having my drives in my Cooler Master case. The fan blows right on the drives so they stay nice and cool. But, I have given thought to having the non OS drives in one of those little boxes, maybe using RAID and mirroring the data on two drives. Just what magic is in those things? These cradles/caddies and the like typically use USB and e-sata connectors. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On 08/08/12 at 10:22pm, Dale wrote: I used something called Gparted to partition this monster. This is temporary tho. What should I be using to partition this thing? What is the best, and easiest, tool for me to use? I have been using cfdisk in the past but it doesn't seem to work on this one. I do want one very large partition and plan to use LVM on it too. Oh, it would be nice if the tool is on LiveCDs, SystemRescue in my case. I use that when the stuff hits the fan and I am covered up pretty deep. ;-) GParted is on systemrescuecd :D. Its that goldenish disk icon on the panel. GParted is a frontend to parted you can use that directly as well. -- - Yohan Pereira The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal. -- Mark Twain
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Yohan Pereira wrote: On 08/08/12 at 10:22pm, Dale wrote: I used something called Gparted to partition this monster. This is temporary tho. What should I be using to partition this thing? What is the best, and easiest, tool for me to use? I have been using cfdisk in the past but it doesn't seem to work on this one. I do want one very large partition and plan to use LVM on it too. Oh, it would be nice if the tool is on LiveCDs, SystemRescue in my case. I use that when the stuff hits the fan and I am covered up pretty deep. ;-) GParted is on systemrescuecd :D. Its that goldenish disk icon on the panel. GParted is a frontend to parted you can use that directly as well. It turned out that my problem was getting it to align properly. It seems that GParted does that pretty well. I guess if I am without a GUI thingy, I can use parted. I couldn't get cgdisk to work right tho. Heck, it took me a bit to get GParted to sort it out and it is supposed to be the easy way. lol Sometimes new toys cause me grief. ;-) Since I like cfdisk, are there any tricks to using cgdisk and getting it to align it correctly? The drive is a Seagate ST3000DM001 3Tb drive. I think this is the key bit: Logical Sector size: 512 bytes Physical Sector size: 4096 bytes Just not sure where cgdisk wants me to put that info. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Wed, 08 Aug 2012 22:22:25 -0500, Dale wrote: I used something called Gparted to partition this monster. This is temporary tho. What should I be using to partition this thing? What is the best, and easiest, tool for me to use? I have been using cfdisk in the past but it doesn't seem to work on this one. Do not use cfdisk on 2TB+ drives, it gives bad alignment. Use gdisk or cgdisk with GPT partition tables. Create a 1MB partition at the start of type EF02, which keeps backward compatibility, then partition as normal. Note that GPT has none of the primary/logical crap, just create the partitions you want. -- Neil Bothwick Downloading - A quick way of catching a virus from anywhere in the world. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Neil Bothwick wrote: On Wed, 08 Aug 2012 22:22:25 -0500, Dale wrote: I used something called Gparted to partition this monster. This is temporary tho. What should I be using to partition this thing? What is the best, and easiest, tool for me to use? I have been using cfdisk in the past but it doesn't seem to work on this one. Do not use cfdisk on 2TB+ drives, it gives bad alignment. Use gdisk or cgdisk with GPT partition tables. Create a 1MB partition at the start of type EF02, which keeps backward compatibility, then partition as normal. Note that GPT has none of the primary/logical crap, just create the partitions you want. A, so that 1Mb partition is what does the alignment thingy? Is it the same on all large drives or does it vary a bit based on size? Thanks. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Thu, 09 Aug 2012 04:35:15 -0500, Dale wrote: Do not use cfdisk on 2TB+ drives, it gives bad alignment. Use gdisk or cgdisk with GPT partition tables. Create a 1MB partition at the start of type EF02, which keeps backward compatibility, then partition as normal. Note that GPT has none of the primary/logical crap, just create the partitions you want. A, so that 1Mb partition is what does the alignment thingy? Is it the same on all large drives or does it vary a bit based on size? No, gdisk/cgdisk does the alignment. The 1MB GPT boot partition give backward compatibility with DOS booting. The size doesn't vary, I've used the same on drives from 120GB to 3TB. -- Neil Bothwick the sum of all human intelligence is constant, only the number of humans increases. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Neil Bothwick wrote: On Thu, 09 Aug 2012 04:35:15 -0500, Dale wrote: Do not use cfdisk on 2TB+ drives, it gives bad alignment. Use gdisk or cgdisk with GPT partition tables. Create a 1MB partition at the start of type EF02, which keeps backward compatibility, then partition as normal. Note that GPT has none of the primary/logical crap, just create the partitions you want. A, so that 1Mb partition is what does the alignment thingy? Is it the same on all large drives or does it vary a bit based on size? No, gdisk/cgdisk does the alignment. The 1MB GPT boot partition give backward compatibility with DOS booting. The size doesn't vary, I've used the same on drives from 120GB to 3TB. Hmmm, then I guess I didn't do something right the first time I tried cgdisk then. It said it wasn't aligned right but I couldn't figure out how to get it to do it. Then I used Gparted and it seemed to do it without me telling it anything. The only difference I saw was the little 1Mb partition. Well, I plan to dd the thing and start over with LVM and all so I'll see what it does next time. Maybe I just didn't do something right. Since I have nothing windoze on here, do I really need to worry about DOS booting? All I have is Gentoo here. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Dale writes: I have seen where people use dd to do this sort of thing to. I read somewhere that if you do a dd and put in all 1's, then all 0's then back again that it is very hard to get any data back off the drive. I think if you do it like over a dozen times, it is deemed impossible to get anything back. I think that is the Government standard of it's gone. There's no need for multiple passes of dd with different values. http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Secure-deletion-a-single-overwrite-will-do-it-739699.html Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Alex Schuster wrote: Dale writes: I have seen where people use dd to do this sort of thing to. I read somewhere that if you do a dd and put in all 1's, then all 0's then back again that it is very hard to get any data back off the drive. I think if you do it like over a dozen times, it is deemed impossible to get anything back. I think that is the Government standard of it's gone. There's no need for multiple passes of dd with different values. http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Secure-deletion-a-single-overwrite-will-do-it-739699.html Wonko I wonder what some Government org like NSA would think about this? Then again, they may want us to believe this so they can get stuff back. ;-) ;-) That said, I always wondered how something can be there when it is erased. On paper, I can see that because it made a physical change to the paper but on magnetic media, it is magnetic not physical. Anyway. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Thu, 09 Aug 2012 08:53:27 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alex Schuster wrote: Dale writes: I have seen where people use dd to do this sort of thing to. I read somewhere that if you do a dd and put in all 1's, then all 0's then back again that it is very hard to get any data back off the drive. I think if you do it like over a dozen times, it is deemed impossible to get anything back. I think that is the Government standard of it's gone. There's no need for multiple passes of dd with different values. http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Secure-deletion-a-single-overwrite-will-do-it-739699.html Wonko I wonder what some Government org like NSA would think about this? Then again, they may want us to believe this so they can get stuff back. ;-) ;-) That said, I always wondered how something can be there when it is erased. On paper, I can see that because it made a physical change to the paper but on magnetic media, it is magnetic not physical. It's quite simple once you understand how disks work. In textbooks we need to keep things simple, so we say things like the magnetic particles are all aligned this way for a 0 and that way for a 1. This gets the concept across but it also let's people believe that bits on a disk are very much binary - like a light switch or a transistor they are either on or off. In practice, nothing could be further from the truth. With disk magnetic media, you aren't dealing with a single isolated thing (such as a chunk of disk that can only be one way), you are dealing with a very very large number of magnetic particles that go to make up one bit. It's how they average out that makes the drive think it's a 0 or a 1. It all works much like tape cassettes - the head has a little coil of wire in it and current flows through the coil. It passes near a magnetic field on the tape, and the current in the coil changes. Read the amount of change using fancy electronics, and voila! you have audio. In the case of disks, it's voila! you have a stream of bits. Disk drives can't afford to be almost right like audio tape though, they have to be exactly right so the drive has some amazing maths built into it for error-correction and redundancy. I believe something like 40% of the space containing raw data is pure error checking (so your 3T drive is actually 4.1T, but you will only ever get to use 3T) The trick is, when you overwrite an area of the disk, you don't erase everything, there are some traces left behind. Pencil and paper is a good analogy. Write something in pencil. Erase wit with a rubber eraser, and write something else in the same space. Now hold the paper up to the light and if you know how to look you can see the indents in the paper from the first thing you wrote. Train your eyes to ignore what's written there now and only look at dented paper with no lead marks, and you can read things quite clearly. James Bond was especially good at this but that's a movie so real life isn't *that* quick. Sekrit magic disk software does a very similar thing - it ignores the current data and looks for traces left behind from the last write, and the ones before that. This trick isn't universal of course. As drive technology advances and IBM figures out new ways to do it, they come up with ideas like using the _depth_ of the magnetic material too. Neat trick - you can double the data stored in the same surface area. With each technology advance, things change a lot, so the amount of reading backwards you can do is always changing and depends very much on exactly what drive you have. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
William Kenworthy wrote: On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 23:18 -0500, Dale wrote: William Kenworthy wrote: On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 21:19 -0500, Dale wrote: Paul Hartman wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: ... Goggle have a well known document (http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf) where they analysed hard drive failures for a very large number of drives ... the basic upshot is that a very large portion of failures happen with no pre-warning, so testing a drive like you are proposing not going to prove a thing. They also found that smart (is quite dumb) and its tests were of little use. And high temperatures and work loads were also not a reliable guide to trends in failure rates, both of which which surprised me. Some of those bathtub curves that I was trained on when setting maintenance schedules dont hold water here! This anaysis of the paper looks quite good if you want the lite view: http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/ BillK Well, I am going by actual real experiences from other users of this model of drive. I don't know what google was testing but I would bet it is not the drive model I just bought. The users who bought this exact model drive report that most failures are either out of the box or within a few weeks to a month. I'm just going to try to increase my odds even if it is just a little bit. Smart may not always predict a failure but it is better than nothing at all. Would you rather have a tool that may predict a failure or no tool at all? Me, I'd rather have something that at least tries too. The one drive I had to go bad, Smart predicted it very well. It said I had about 24 hrs to get my stuff off. Sure enough, the next day, it wouldn't do anything but spin. Without Smart and its prediction, I'd have lost the data on the drive with no warning at all. A couple questions. What if while I am testing this drive, it dies? Does that prove that my testing benefited me then? Dale :-) :-) Read the paper - its written by someone who buys drives in batches of 100's+, not by a few guys posting on a forum somewhere who bought one random drive, who probably didn't use anti-static techniques handling the drive, and thumped it around in the boot of the car or got it via the courier who was famous for delivering TV's by throwing them over the fence. It is a bit of an eye opener - read it. My impression of models is that it is not really the model that has a run of failures, but the batch so a different run of the same model will have a different failure pattern. There are exceptions such as those IBM 60G deathstar drives, but then again they fixed it and following drives of the same model were fine. My own experience of smart is it tells you something, but what it seems to say is not right (notice I am not saying it tells lies, but that the data and interpretation don't make sense on the drives Ive had) Drive failure does seem to be a semi-random lottery, but I am seriously doubtful that testing will do anything ... it has as much chance of precipitating failure that wouldn't occur otherwise because you are seriously hammering it, or weakening the drive so it will fail at some random time, but perhaps weeks away rather than the years it otherwise would, or nothing will happen except for wasted electrons. Then again, I am of the view that modern electronics is designed/programmed to fail a few seconds past warranty expiry (why else do most devices have timekeeping built in :) BillK Actually, I read the paper a long time ago. May give it another look but I'm still going by what people have posted about this specific model. If they make them all the same, then testing to at least see if it is going to get past the initial stages is a good idea. I do think some failures were because of the BIOS and I stated that in my original post. Getting a DOA drive can happen but when there are mobos around that can't see large drives, then one has to consider it. The ones I worry about are the ones that worked for a few weeks or a month then died. They obviously don't have BIOS issues but some other problem. Still, all things considered, I'm going to test the drive. If it can pass the test then I will feel better about putting my data on it. As for the paper: root@fireball / # ls -al /home/dale/Desktop/disk_failures.pdf -rw-r--r-- 1 dale users 247492 May 21 17:58 /home/dale/Desktop/disk_failures.pdf root@fireball / # I read it back in May. It's still sitting on my desktop. I might also add, it is about 5 years old. Drives have changed since then. For one, they have gotten larger. We don't know what else may have changed either. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Wednesday 08 August 2012 01:32:55 Mark Knecht wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Peter Humphrey pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org wrote: On Tuesday 07 August 2012 23:39:05 Mark Knecht wrote: Dead out of the box is dead. However a drive failing in a couple of months _might_ have showed up in the smartctl output ... I wonder. Does anyone here know what most often causes HD failure after a couple of months? I imagine it's some component whose material is substandard, in which case it might show up with smartclt or it might not. I dunno. -- Rgds Peter This has come up before on this list I think. I must have missed it then. This is the overarching sort of thinking about failure over lifetime... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve Yes, I'm familiar with that idea thanks. I was wondering what specific causes were most implicated. -- Rgds Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Wednesday 08 Aug 2012 05:21:31 Adam Carter wrote: To wipe a drive use dban. - live CD which uses (US) gov approved standards of wipe methods/patterns. Or shred, which comes with coreutils. dd is only going to show sectors on a failed drive - too late! To explain, modern drives have a store of locations they can use to transparently replace any failed locations (apparently similar to the way SSD's do it) - the internal drive electronics handle this and its not visible externally though smart data seems to show it, but as google says, smart is a bit suspect. The problem of a bad sector will only show once all the reserved locations are used up, by which time the drive is usually in rampant failure. I do suspect this is one reason for googles results - actual failures of the media (as against the motors/electronics are much as they always have been, but the drives are not reporting them until its too late. Ahh - go to know. My reasoning assumed that smart reports all remaps. May be it does, but I understand that dd or shred won't overwrite them, or any bad blocks. You'll need the hdparm ATA secure erase (or enhanced secure erase) feature for that. BTW, Dale make sure that you plug the drive in a SATA controller for running the hdparm erase function. It has been reported that doing this using a USB port will brick the drive! -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Mick wrote: On Wednesday 08 Aug 2012 05:21:31 Adam Carter wrote: To wipe a drive use dban. - live CD which uses (US) gov approved standards of wipe methods/patterns. Or shred, which comes with coreutils. dd is only going to show sectors on a failed drive - too late! To explain, modern drives have a store of locations they can use to transparently replace any failed locations (apparently similar to the way SSD's do it) - the internal drive electronics handle this and its not visible externally though smart data seems to show it, but as google says, smart is a bit suspect. The problem of a bad sector will only show once all the reserved locations are used up, by which time the drive is usually in rampant failure. I do suspect this is one reason for googles results - actual failures of the media (as against the motors/electronics are much as they always have been, but the drives are not reporting them until its too late. Ahh - go to know. My reasoning assumed that smart reports all remaps. May be it does, but I understand that dd or shred won't overwrite them, or any bad blocks. You'll need the hdparm ATA secure erase (or enhanced secure erase) feature for that. BTW, Dale make sure that you plug the drive in a SATA controller for running the hdparm erase function. It has been reported that doing this using a USB port will brick the drive! I don't use USB for drives, except the USB stick thingys. I have a question sort of related to this. Anyone can share info. I see boxes that hold drives in them and connect via ethernet or something like that. Do those work really well? I thought about getting one someday but I don't know what they do and how they do it EXACTLY. Is it like a small puter in there or some other means of getting the data across? Right now, I like having my drives in my Cooler Master case. The fan blows right on the drives so they stay nice and cool. But, I have given thought to having the non OS drives in one of those little boxes, maybe using RAID and mirroring the data on two drives. Just what magic is in those things? Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Sent from my Android device. On Aug 6, 2012 4:22 PM, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Howdy, I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way. Should be here Wednesday. I have seen some reviews where it would not work right. I think some of it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large. Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up to the task before putting my data on it. It's going to be so much data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point. Come on, 2 to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs. Really? lol Maybe a external drive later on but for now, well. I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal. I wouldn't want to torture the drive, but just make sure it works. What I do: boot parted magic liveCD, run ATA SECURE ERASE on the drive (you probably need to suspend and awaken your machine to unlock the drive, the GUI tool in the liveCD does this for you automatically), that will do factory reformat/low-level reformat, then run SMART full test which can take many hours. If it survives both of those, and doesn't make audible clicking noises in the process, I feel confident that it is in working order. Those steps are more important if I'm testing a used or refurbished drive, for a new drive you may want to skip the secure erase and only do the smart test. If SMART test passes then I don't think there's any reason to run badblocks, but you can have it run during mkfs if you want reassurance.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 9:19 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: 4 or 5 hours huh. I guess drives are a lot faster now. Back in the late 80's or early 90's, it took that long for those whimpy little 100Mb drives. Ooops, my ages is showing again. lol I recently found a box of hard drives in my house and have been using ddrescue to pull the data off of them. These drives were not that old, around 1gb each. Desktop drives. I was amazed at how slow they were relative to today's drives... 2MB/sec? 5MB/sec? My internet connection is faster than that now. Also, found a dead 5.25 Quantum hard drive... forgot how huge those are. Weighed a ton and it was built like a tank. Your new drive will probably go around 100-150MB/sec or so on sequential writes. So you can do the math and figure out how many hours that will take.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Paul Hartman wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 9:19 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: 4 or 5 hours huh. I guess drives are a lot faster now. Back in the late 80's or early 90's, it took that long for those whimpy little 100Mb drives. Ooops, my ages is showing again. lol I recently found a box of hard drives in my house and have been using ddrescue to pull the data off of them. These drives were not that old, around 1gb each. Desktop drives. I was amazed at how slow they were relative to today's drives... 2MB/sec? 5MB/sec? My internet connection is faster than that now. Also, found a dead 5.25 Quantum hard drive... forgot how huge those are. Weighed a ton and it was built like a tank. Your new drive will probably go around 100-150MB/sec or so on sequential writes. So you can do the math and figure out how many hours that will take. It won't be that fast. The drive supports 6Gbs/sec but my mobo is only 3Gbs/sec. I hope to upgrade my mobo at some point. Then maybe the ram and CPU. I been looking at those 8 core CPUs a bit. The prices are coming down slowly. Anyway, I'll only get the 3Gbs/sec for now. I used to have a couple of those really old 14 inch hard drives. I think I sold them for scrap a few years ago. They were mostly aluminium if I recall correctly. They were only a few megabytes but they sure was big. Our age is showing. lol I bet folks know I am not a teenager now. ;-) Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Dale wrote: Howdy, I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way. Should be here Wednesday. I have seen some reviews where it would not work right. I think some of it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large. Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up to the task before putting my data on it. It's going to be so much data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point. Come on, 2 to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs. Really? lol Maybe a external drive later on but for now, well. I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal. Thanks Dale :-) :-) Update. I went to the mailbox and there was a nice pretty brown box. Bad thing is, drive is OEM with just a blister pack around it. The box had almost no packing, just a small amount of brown paper. Eww! It was just flopping around in the box. Anyway, I stole a SATA cable from another rig and got this: root@fireball / # smartctl -t long /dev/sdd smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [x86_64-linux-3.5.0-gentoo] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION === Sending command: Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in off-line mode. Drive command Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in off-line mode successful. Testing has begun. Please wait 255 minutes for test to complete. Test will complete after Wed Aug 8 17:10:46 2012 Use smartctl -X to abort test. root@fireball / # 255 minutes. Wow. My plan, let this test finish, do a little bit of copy and rm, then test again. I figure copying 800Gbs to it should give it a little bit of a work out since I will be doing it twice. Yeppie. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Dale wrote: Howdy, I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way. Should be here Wednesday. I have seen some reviews where it would not work right. I think some of it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large. Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up to the task before putting my data on it. It's going to be so much data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point. Come on, 2 to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs. Really? lol Maybe a external drive later on but for now, well. I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal. Thanks Dale :-) :-) Update. I went to the mailbox and there was a nice pretty brown box. Bad thing is, drive is OEM with just a blister pack around it. The box had almost no packing, just a small amount of brown paper. Eww! It was just flopping around in the box. Anyway, I stole a SATA cable from another rig and got this: root@fireball / # smartctl -t long /dev/sdd smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [x86_64-linux-3.5.0-gentoo] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION === Sending command: Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in off-line mode. Drive command Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in off-line mode successful. Testing has begun. Please wait 255 minutes for test to complete. Test will complete after Wed Aug 8 17:10:46 2012 Use smartctl -X to abort test. root@fireball / # 255 minutes. Wow. My plan, let this test finish, do a little bit of copy and rm, then test again. I figure copying 800Gbs to it should give it a little bit of a work out since I will be doing it twice. Yeppie. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Now, don't you wear it out, you hear?!?!? ;-) If your machine runs all the time you can add smartctl runs as chron jobs that run at midnight and have the results emailed to you. Look at them once a week and other than an unpredictable catastrophic failure you'll likely know a long time before it fails. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Mark Knecht wrote: Now, don't you wear it out, you hear?!?!? ;-) If your machine runs all the time you can add smartctl runs as chron jobs that run at midnight and have the results emailed to you. Look at them once a week and other than an unpredictable catastrophic failure you'll likely know a long time before it fails. Cheers, Mark Not going to wear it out but going to make sure it survived the trip across the country while bouncing around in the box. :/ Check this out: Aug 8 12:46:47 localhost smartd[2083]: Device: /dev/sdd, type changed from 'scsi' to 'sat' Aug 8 12:46:47 localhost smartd[2083]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], opened Aug 8 12:46:47 localhost smartd[2083]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], ST3000DM001-9YN166, S/N:Z1F0PKT5, WWN:5-000c50-04d79e15c, FW:CC4C, 3.00 TB Aug 8 12:46:47 localhost smartd[2083]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], not found in smartd database. Aug 8 12:46:47 localhost smartd[2083]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], is SMART capable. Adding to monitor list. And: Aug 8 13:46:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 80% remaining Aug 8 14:16:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 70% remaining Aug 8 14:46:48 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 60% remaining Aug 8 15:16:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 50% remaining Aug 8 15:46:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 40% remaining Aug 8 16:16:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 30% remaining Aug 8 16:46:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 20% remaining It's working on it. ;-) Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Dale wrote: Not going to wear it out but going to make sure it survived the trip across the country while bouncing around in the box. :/ Check this out: Aug 8 12:46:47 localhost smartd[2083]: Device: /dev/sdd, type changed from 'scsi' to 'sat' Aug 8 12:46:47 localhost smartd[2083]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], opened Aug 8 12:46:47 localhost smartd[2083]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], ST3000DM001-9YN166, S/N:Z1F0PKT5, WWN:5-000c50-04d79e15c, FW:CC4C, 3.00 TB Aug 8 12:46:47 localhost smartd[2083]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], not found in smartd database. Aug 8 12:46:47 localhost smartd[2083]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], is SMART capable. Adding to monitor list. And: Aug 8 13:46:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 80% remaining Aug 8 14:16:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 70% remaining Aug 8 14:46:48 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 60% remaining Aug 8 15:16:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 50% remaining Aug 8 15:46:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 40% remaining Aug 8 16:16:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 30% remaining Aug 8 16:46:47 localhost smartd[2085]: Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], self-test in progress, 20% remaining It's working on it. ;-) Dale :-) :-) OK. Finished a selftest. So far, so good. Now, why didn't someone remind me that I had to use some special tool to partition this monster? It took some doing but I'm not sure I am doing this the right way. It works for testing tho. I used something called Gparted to partition this monster. This is temporary tho. What should I be using to partition this thing? What is the best, and easiest, tool for me to use? I have been using cfdisk in the past but it doesn't seem to work on this one. I do want one very large partition and plan to use LVM on it too. Oh, it would be nice if the tool is on LiveCDs, SystemRescue in my case. I use that when the stuff hits the fan and I am covered up pretty deep. ;-) Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions? Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Paul Hartman wrote: On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Howdy, I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way. Should be here Wednesday. I have seen some reviews where it would not work right. I think some of it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large. Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up to the task before putting my data on it. It's going to be so much data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point. Come on, 2 to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs. Really? lol Maybe a external drive later on but for now, well. I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal. I wouldn't want to torture the drive, but just make sure it works. What I do: boot parted magic liveCD, run ATA SECURE ERASE on the drive (you probably need to suspend and awaken your machine to unlock the drive, the GUI tool in the liveCD does this for you automatically), that will do factory reformat/low-level reformat, then run SMART full test which can take many hours. If it survives both of those, and doesn't make audible clicking noises in the process, I feel confident that it is in working order. Those steps are more important if I'm testing a used or refurbished drive, for a new drive you may want to skip the secure erase and only do the smart test. If SMART test passes then I don't think there's any reason to run badblocks, but you can have it run during mkfs if you want reassurance. Well, I don't want to force it to fail just for the heck of it. I just want to make sure it is not going to fail in the first few months of use. The reviews that people have wrote that had problems were generally either out of the box dead or failed after a few weeks or a month or so. I figure if I can run tests that would be about a month or so of use, then maybe I am OK. That is my goal. I just don't want to get all my data on there and such and then have it go belly up. I didn't know you could do low level formats anymore. Really? What package provides that? Hmmm, I'm thinking about those HOURS spent formatting a 100Mb drive and then thinking about how long it will take to do a 3Tb drive. O_O I mean really O_O. LOL Dale :-) :-) P. S. It should be here tomorrow. UPS dropped it off at the post office today. -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: SNIP Well, I don't want to force it to fail just for the heck of it. Of course... I just want to make sure it is not going to fail in the first few months of use. But what you don't know about those failed drives is whether the user could have predicted it by watching the smartctl data more closely. Dead out of the box is dead. However a drive failing in a couple of months _might_ have showed up in the smartctl output in which case the user could have transferred data to a new drive. Keep in mind, that's all you're talking about here. You don't want to spend the money for a second drive, but you know you'll have to do _something_ if the drive starts failing. Not having backups isn't a good plan... Take care, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Mark Knecht wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: SNIP Well, I don't want to force it to fail just for the heck of it. Of course... I just want to make sure it is not going to fail in the first few months of use. But what you don't know about those failed drives is whether the user could have predicted it by watching the smartctl data more closely. Dead out of the box is dead. However a drive failing in a couple of months _might_ have showed up in the smartctl output in which case the user could have transferred data to a new drive. Keep in mind, that's all you're talking about here. You don't want to spend the money for a second drive, but you know you'll have to do _something_ if the drive starts failing. Not having backups isn't a good plan... Take care, Mark I realize that not having backups is not good. Thing is, I really don't have a way to back up that much data. Heck, I got about 1Tb that will be transfered to the new drive when I feel it is ready. Other than a second drive, I have no means of backing up that much data. I thought about a blue ray burner but even that is a lot of media. I think I figured up over a 100. Plain DVDs are even worse. My plan is to watch the logs and buy another drive as soon as I can. In the meantime, it is what it is. I don't like it but I can't change it either. If it helps any, I have only had one drive to ever fail on me. It was a WD and was pretty old. It gave me enough warning to get the data off tho. We gotta love that. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Tuesday 07 August 2012 23:39:05 Mark Knecht wrote: Dead out of the box is dead. However a drive failing in a couple of months _might_ have showed up in the smartctl output ... I wonder. Does anyone here know what most often causes HD failure after a couple of months? I imagine it's some component whose material is substandard, in which case it might show up with smartclt or it might not. I dunno. -- Rgds Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I didn't know you could do low level formats anymore. Really? What package provides that? Hmmm, I'm thinking about those HOURS spent formatting a 100Mb drive and then thinking about how long it will take to do a 3Tb drive. O_O I mean really O_O. LOL hdparm provides it. Do a search for ATA secure erase or enhanced secure erase. It is as close as there is to a low-level format in modern drives. It is basically a erase/format within the drive's firmware, that resets it all back to factory, including bad sectors, with the same pattern of 1's and 0's and everything. You can do it with hdparm but it's tricky and contains many warnings about killing your drive. It is considered the only true way to properly erase a hard drive as anything else is just overwriting and does not necessarily touch all the areas that the firmware can touch. I think actual implementation of what the secure erases do varies from drive to drive, but they'll all format the whole disk for sure. The parted magic live CD contains a GUI tool to automate it and it is extremely simple to use. Choose your drive and go. On a 2tb drive I think it took 4 or 5 hours when I ran it. There is absolutely no feedback while it is running, so you're just waiting with no progress indicator or anything. You can also do SMART tests from within the parted magic live CD environment. And of course partitioning. :) That all being said, when performing this kind of operation I usually like to use a live CD and unplug ALL OTHER HARD DRIVES except for the one I'm going to destroy. I don't want to accidentally erase the wrong drive. (In fact I have an old Pentium 4 computer with no HDDs that I use solely for the purpose of testing live CDs, testing and formatting drives, partitioning new drives before i put them into a production machine)
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 4:05 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: In the meantime, it is what it is. I completely understand Dale, and I'm not picking on you. Just get that second drive as soon as you can. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Peter Humphrey pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org wrote: On Tuesday 07 August 2012 23:39:05 Mark Knecht wrote: Dead out of the box is dead. However a drive failing in a couple of months _might_ have showed up in the smartctl output ... I wonder. Does anyone here know what most often causes HD failure after a couple of months? I imagine it's some component whose material is substandard, in which case it might show up with smartclt or it might not. I dunno. -- Rgds Peter This has come up before on this list I think. This is the overarching sort of thinking about failure over lifetime... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Paul Hartman wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I didn't know you could do low level formats anymore. Really? What package provides that? Hmmm, I'm thinking about those HOURS spent formatting a 100Mb drive and then thinking about how long it will take to do a 3Tb drive. O_O I mean really O_O. LOL hdparm provides it. Do a search for ATA secure erase or enhanced secure erase. It is as close as there is to a low-level format in modern drives. It is basically a erase/format within the drive's firmware, that resets it all back to factory, including bad sectors, with the same pattern of 1's and 0's and everything. You can do it with hdparm but it's tricky and contains many warnings about killing your drive. It is considered the only true way to properly erase a hard drive as anything else is just overwriting and does not necessarily touch all the areas that the firmware can touch. I think actual implementation of what the secure erases do varies from drive to drive, but they'll all format the whole disk for sure. The parted magic live CD contains a GUI tool to automate it and it is extremely simple to use. Choose your drive and go. On a 2tb drive I think it took 4 or 5 hours when I ran it. There is absolutely no feedback while it is running, so you're just waiting with no progress indicator or anything. You can also do SMART tests from within the parted magic live CD environment. And of course partitioning. :) That all being said, when performing this kind of operation I usually like to use a live CD and unplug ALL OTHER HARD DRIVES except for the one I'm going to destroy. I don't want to accidentally erase the wrong drive. (In fact I have an old Pentium 4 computer with no HDDs that I use solely for the purpose of testing live CDs, testing and formatting drives, partitioning new drives before i put them into a production machine) I have seen where people use dd to do this sort of thing to. I read somewhere that if you do a dd and put in all 1's, then all 0's then back again that it is very hard to get any data back off the drive. I think if you do it like over a dozen times, it is deemed impossible to get anything back. I think that is the Government standard of it's gone. 4 or 5 hours huh. I guess drives are a lot faster now. Back in the late 80's or early 90's, it took that long for those whimpy little 100Mb drives. Ooops, my ages is showing again. lol I got to go read up on hdparm. I already have it installed here. I'm not planning to use this part but do want to read up on this. Thanks. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 21:19 -0500, Dale wrote: Paul Hartman wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I didn't know you could do low level formats anymore. Really? What package provides that? Hmmm, I'm thinking about those HOURS spent formatting a 100Mb drive and then thinking about how long it will take to do a 3Tb drive. O_O I mean really O_O. LOL hdparm provides it. Do a search for ATA secure erase or enhanced secure erase. It is as close as there is to a low-level format in ... I have seen where people use dd to do this sort of thing to. I read somewhere that if you do a dd and put in all 1's, then all 0's then back again that it is very hard to get any data back off the drive. I think if you do it like over a dozen times, it is deemed impossible to get anything back. I think that is the Government standard of it's gone. 4 or 5 hours huh. I guess drives are a lot faster now. Back in the late 80's or early 90's, it took that long for those whimpy little 100Mb drives. Ooops, my ages is showing again. lol I got to go read up on hdparm. I already have it installed here. I'm not planning to use this part but do want to read up on this. Thanks. Dale :-) :-) Goggle have a well known document (http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf) where they analysed hard drive failures for a very large number of drives ... the basic upshot is that a very large portion of failures happen with no pre-warning, so testing a drive like you are proposing not going to prove a thing. They also found that smart (is quite dumb) and its tests were of little use. And high temperatures and work loads were also not a reliable guide to trends in failure rates, both of which which surprised me. Some of those bathtub curves that I was trained on when setting maintenance schedules dont hold water here! This anaysis of the paper looks quite good if you want the lite view: http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/ BillK BillK
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
I have seen where people use dd to do this sort of thing to. I read somewhere that if you do a dd and put in all 1's, then all 0's then back again that it is very hard to get any data back off the drive. I think if you do it like over a dozen times, it is deemed impossible to get anything back. I think that is the Government standard of it's gone. I've heard the old attacks to recover data from a zerod drive are no longer viable for disks of greater capacity than about 10G. I haven't seen the information myself, however. A single pass using dd would probably a good way of detecting any existing bad blocks, so a smartctl then dd then smartctl again and a diff of the results may be interesting. I just use a 1TB software mirror for my backups.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 14:02 +1000, Adam Carter wrote: I have seen where people use dd to do this sort of thing to. I read somewhere that if you do a dd and put in all 1's, then all 0's then back again that it is very hard to get any data back off the drive. I think if you do it like over a dozen times, it is deemed impossible to get anything back. I think that is the Government standard of it's gone. I've heard the old attacks to recover data from a zerod drive are no longer viable for disks of greater capacity than about 10G. I haven't seen the information myself, however. A single pass using dd would probably a good way of detecting any existing bad blocks, so a smartctl then dd then smartctl again and a diff of the results may be interesting. I just use a 1TB software mirror for my backups. To wipe a drive use dban. - live CD which uses (US) gov approved standards of wipe methods/patterns. dd is only going to show sectors on a failed drive - too late! To explain, modern drives have a store of locations they can use to transparently replace any failed locations (apparently similar to the way SSD's do it) - the internal drive electronics handle this and its not visible externally though smart data seems to show it, but as google says, smart is a bit suspect. The problem of a bad sector will only show once all the reserved locations are used up, by which time the drive is usually in rampant failure. I do suspect this is one reason for googles results - actual failures of the media (as against the motors/electronics are much as they always have been, but the drives are not reporting them until its too late. BillK
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
William Kenworthy wrote: On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 21:19 -0500, Dale wrote: Paul Hartman wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I didn't know you could do low level formats anymore. Really? What package provides that? Hmmm, I'm thinking about those HOURS spent formatting a 100Mb drive and then thinking about how long it will take to do a 3Tb drive. O_O I mean really O_O. LOL hdparm provides it. Do a search for ATA secure erase or enhanced secure erase. It is as close as there is to a low-level format in ... I have seen where people use dd to do this sort of thing to. I read somewhere that if you do a dd and put in all 1's, then all 0's then back again that it is very hard to get any data back off the drive. I think if you do it like over a dozen times, it is deemed impossible to get anything back. I think that is the Government standard of it's gone. 4 or 5 hours huh. I guess drives are a lot faster now. Back in the late 80's or early 90's, it took that long for those whimpy little 100Mb drives. Ooops, my ages is showing again. lol I got to go read up on hdparm. I already have it installed here. I'm not planning to use this part but do want to read up on this. Thanks. Dale :-) :-) Goggle have a well known document (http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf) where they analysed hard drive failures for a very large number of drives ... the basic upshot is that a very large portion of failures happen with no pre-warning, so testing a drive like you are proposing not going to prove a thing. They also found that smart (is quite dumb) and its tests were of little use. And high temperatures and work loads were also not a reliable guide to trends in failure rates, both of which which surprised me. Some of those bathtub curves that I was trained on when setting maintenance schedules dont hold water here! This anaysis of the paper looks quite good if you want the lite view: http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/ BillK BillK Well, I am going by actual real experiences from other users of this model of drive. I don't know what google was testing but I would bet it is not the drive model I just bought. The users who bought this exact model drive report that most failures are either out of the box or within a few weeks to a month. I'm just going to try to increase my odds even if it is just a little bit. Smart may not always predict a failure but it is better than nothing at all. Would you rather have a tool that may predict a failure or no tool at all? Me, I'd rather have something that at least tries too. The one drive I had to go bad, Smart predicted it very well. It said I had about 24 hrs to get my stuff off. Sure enough, the next day, it wouldn't do anything but spin. Without Smart and its prediction, I'd have lost the data on the drive with no warning at all. A couple questions. What if while I am testing this drive, it dies? Does that prove that my testing benefited me then? Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
To wipe a drive use dban. - live CD which uses (US) gov approved standards of wipe methods/patterns. Or shred, which comes with coreutils. dd is only going to show sectors on a failed drive - too late! To explain, modern drives have a store of locations they can use to transparently replace any failed locations (apparently similar to the way SSD's do it) - the internal drive electronics handle this and its not visible externally though smart data seems to show it, but as google says, smart is a bit suspect. The problem of a bad sector will only show once all the reserved locations are used up, by which time the drive is usually in rampant failure. I do suspect this is one reason for googles results - actual failures of the media (as against the motors/electronics are much as they always have been, but the drives are not reporting them until its too late. Ahh - go to know. My reasoning assumed that smart reports all remaps.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 23:18 -0500, Dale wrote: William Kenworthy wrote: On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 21:19 -0500, Dale wrote: Paul Hartman wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: ... Goggle have a well known document (http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf) where they analysed hard drive failures for a very large number of drives ... the basic upshot is that a very large portion of failures happen with no pre-warning, so testing a drive like you are proposing not going to prove a thing. They also found that smart (is quite dumb) and its tests were of little use. And high temperatures and work loads were also not a reliable guide to trends in failure rates, both of which which surprised me. Some of those bathtub curves that I was trained on when setting maintenance schedules dont hold water here! This anaysis of the paper looks quite good if you want the lite view: http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/ BillK Well, I am going by actual real experiences from other users of this model of drive. I don't know what google was testing but I would bet it is not the drive model I just bought. The users who bought this exact model drive report that most failures are either out of the box or within a few weeks to a month. I'm just going to try to increase my odds even if it is just a little bit. Smart may not always predict a failure but it is better than nothing at all. Would you rather have a tool that may predict a failure or no tool at all? Me, I'd rather have something that at least tries too. The one drive I had to go bad, Smart predicted it very well. It said I had about 24 hrs to get my stuff off. Sure enough, the next day, it wouldn't do anything but spin. Without Smart and its prediction, I'd have lost the data on the drive with no warning at all. A couple questions. What if while I am testing this drive, it dies? Does that prove that my testing benefited me then? Dale :-) :-) Read the paper - its written by someone who buys drives in batches of 100's+, not by a few guys posting on a forum somewhere who bought one random drive, who probably didn't use anti-static techniques handling the drive, and thumped it around in the boot of the car or got it via the courier who was famous for delivering TV's by throwing them over the fence. It is a bit of an eye opener - read it. My impression of models is that it is not really the model that has a run of failures, but the batch so a different run of the same model will have a different failure pattern. There are exceptions such as those IBM 60G deathstar drives, but then again they fixed it and following drives of the same model were fine. My own experience of smart is it tells you something, but what it seems to say is not right (notice I am not saying it tells lies, but that the data and interpretation don't make sense on the drives Ive had) Drive failure does seem to be a semi-random lottery, but I am seriously doubtful that testing will do anything ... it has as much chance of precipitating failure that wouldn't occur otherwise because you are seriously hammering it, or weakening the drive so it will fail at some random time, but perhaps weeks away rather than the years it otherwise would, or nothing will happen except for wasted electrons. Then again, I am of the view that modern electronics is designed/programmed to fail a few seconds past warranty expiry (why else do most devices have timekeeping built in :) BillK
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Dale wrote: Howdy, I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way. Should be here Wednesday. I have seen some reviews where it would not work right. I think some of it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large. Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up to the task before putting my data on it. It's going to be so much data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point. Come on, 2 to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs. Really? lol Maybe a external drive later on but for now, well. I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal. Thanks Dale :-) :-) I seem to have got a few really good responses to my question. Since I really want to test this drive really hard, I'll try them all. lol If it survives a few runs of all this, maybe it is going to live. Like the one with the script too. May have to edit for my needs but certainly a GREAT start. While at it, I found a lot of references to the flood in Japan or I assume it was Japan. Anyone think this could still be a problem? Should they all be flushed out of the system by now? Pardon the flush term there. ;-) Linky: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1310560CatId=4357 Please, no hard drive brand flame wars. Seagates fail, WD fails, they all fail at some point. We all know that already. This is what I got so it is what it is. :-D That is why I want to test this thing like a wild man BEFORE putting anything on it. If it has a issue, hopefully the test will bring that to the front now instead of later. Waiting on Wednesday to get here now. Dale :-) :-) P. S. What is a good way to back up something this large BESIDES another drive the same size or larger? I thought about getting a blue ray burner but even that will take a lot of media. Another drive is all I can think of myself. -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
What do you gain if you abuse your drive so hard that its lifetime is severly impacted? Am 06.08.2012 11:47 schrieb Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com: Dale wrote: Howdy, I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way. Should be here Wednesday. I have seen some reviews where it would not work right. I think some of it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large. Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up to the task before putting my data on it. It's going to be so much data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point. Come on, 2 to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs. Really? lol Maybe a external drive later on but for now, well. I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal. Thanks Dale :-) :-) I seem to have got a few really good responses to my question. Since I really want to test this drive really hard, I'll try them all. lol If it survives a few runs of all this, maybe it is going to live. Like the one with the script too. May have to edit for my needs but certainly a GREAT start. While at it, I found a lot of references to the flood in Japan or I assume it was Japan. Anyone think this could still be a problem? Should they all be flushed out of the system by now? Pardon the flush term there. ;-) Linky: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1310560CatId=4357 Please, no hard drive brand flame wars. Seagates fail, WD fails, they all fail at some point. We all know that already. This is what I got so it is what it is. :-D That is why I want to test this thing like a wild man BEFORE putting anything on it. If it has a issue, hopefully the test will bring that to the front now instead of later. Waiting on Wednesday to get here now. Dale :-) :-) P. S. What is a good way to back up something this large BESIDES another drive the same size or larger? I thought about getting a blue ray burner but even that will take a lot of media. Another drive is all I can think of myself. -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Monday 06 Aug 2012 10:42:17 Dale wrote: If it has a issue, hopefully the test will bring that to the front now instead of later. Or it is just going to knacker your drive and make it fail earlier that it would otherwise (esp if you overheat it)? ha, ha! P. S. What is a good way to back up something this large BESIDES another drive the same size or larger? I thought about getting a blue ray burner but even that will take a lot of media. Another drive is all I can think of myself. Splitting it? Partimage would do that and so would star/tar for fs level backups. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: What do you gain if you abuse your drive so hard that its lifetime is severly impacted? That if it has a problem that will cause it to fail soon in it's life, then I can find it soon. Remember that curve about failures? I would like to get past that first part of the curve. Maybe by the time I get to the later part, I'll have another drive or some backup scheme. Most the failures I have read about in reviews for this drive were early or was just plain old DOA. Testing it will get me past that. I'd rather it fail before I get my data on it instead of after. I thought I posted why I wanted to do this in my first post. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Mick wrote: On Monday 06 Aug 2012 10:42:17 Dale wrote: If it has a issue, hopefully the test will bring that to the front now instead of later. Or it is just going to knacker your drive and make it fail earlier that it would otherwise (esp if you overheat it)? ha, ha! Well, if it is going to fail because of anything, including heat, I would rather it do so BEFORE I put my stuff on it. Right now, a backup is not possible other than a blue ray or something. Also, I have a Cooler Master case with the fan blowing right on the drives. If it gets hot and blows a fuse, it has a problem anyway. It may as well die early while under warranty. P. S. What is a good way to back up something this large BESIDES another drive the same size or larger? I thought about getting a blue ray burner but even that will take a lot of media. Another drive is all I can think of myself. Splitting it? Partimage would do that and so would star/tar for fs level backups. Split what? The drive into two partitions or something? If that is what you mean, if it dies, I'd still loose it all. If you meant two drives, well, I only have one on the way right now. It will be a while before I can get another. In the past, I just backed up stuff on DVDs. 3Tbs is a lot of DVDs tho. It won't take to long to fill that up either. I love my DSL. lol I hope to get another drive in the future tho. Just going to be a little while. ;-) Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 06.08.2012 12:14, Dale wrote: Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: What do you gain if you abuse your drive so hard that its lifetime is severly impacted? That if it has a problem that will cause it to fail soon in it's life, then I can find it soon. Remember that curve about failures? I would like to get past that first part of the curve. Maybe by the time I get to the later part, I'll have another drive or some backup scheme. Most the failures I have read about in reviews for this drive were early or was just plain old DOA. Testing it will get me past that. I'd rather it fail before I get my data on it instead of after. I thought I posted why I wanted to do this in my first post. Dale :-) :-) Why not simply get you data on it and use it for about 2 weeks? Maybe you should mirror important stuff to the old drive for that time. After about 2 weeks of normal usage you should be well out of the beginnig of that bathtub curve (I always had problems when copying data to the new drive when I had a bad one, except DOA of course). -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJQH6ESAAoJEJwwOFaNFkYc1f0IAK/UpzNp/r4KBYczYIc9jKmJ 3JBvtCWPZkJ1qRXfZtErTk/oamPa+/iapJSoaoj4p45Uvjq5Qh5WDXiAlZs3U805 X1nCc9OMfKc3KGK3bcSKLhSIA1oV1imdgq1OqH/NeioEqOuVy56ZOdvwq6ml2fwM 1ZjBjsp1uqirork5eyZcJGGoNcsJpX3DvTZ7tBwM0gDFHcu4Yj3alEy7PgiYny4W z0/K91jnyBouX7+CwtWKvGNgjGqMxXXp4SUS4MuOKs06p4LFKi/gHBRCAYjuTRK1 O3cKfz4nHMI+F2rH48sCAUgT5K88cdiX40lZpqTWyqADUQO9F1ZzTcg4fZW447s= =s524 -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Mon, 06 Aug 2012 04:42:17 -0500, Dale wrote: P. S. What is a good way to back up something this large BESIDES another drive the same size or larger? A smaller drive, backups can be compressed. Also, you don't need to backup everything, for example rips of DVDs and CDs you own can be recreated. If you organise your data to separate stuff that needs to be backed up from that which doesn't you can reduce the amount of space needed. Factor in that you won't be filling this drive for a while and that you don't need maximum performance from a backup drive and you'll almost certainly get by with using your old drive(s). Really important stuff should be stored offsite, Amazon S3 gives the best value for me. -- Neil Bothwick Ask a silly person, get a silly answer signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Neil Bothwick wrote: On Mon, 06 Aug 2012 04:42:17 -0500, Dale wrote: P. S. What is a good way to back up something this large BESIDES another drive the same size or larger? A smaller drive, backups can be compressed. Also, you don't need to backup everything, for example rips of DVDs and CDs you own can be recreated. If you organise your data to separate stuff that needs to be backed up from that which doesn't you can reduce the amount of space needed. Factor in that you won't be filling this drive for a while and that you don't need maximum performance from a backup drive and you'll almost certainly get by with using your old drive(s). Really important stuff should be stored offsite, Amazon S3 gives the best value for me. What I have on there is videos. When I tried to compress some and test, it was basically the same size. I guess videos don't compress to much? When I put this in, I'm going to redo the whole thing. Ages ago when I was green all over and not just around the gills, I created a /data directory and that is where I stored stuff. My new plan, the new drive will become /home and I will be putting things where they should have been to begin with. I plan to reorganize this whole mess I created ages ago. That video directory is HUGE tho. root@fireball / # du -shc /data/Videos/ 703G/data/Videos/ 703Gtotal root@fireball / # While I am at it. You should have a good answer for this one. What is a good file system for this sort of thing? I been using ext4 but it sure does use a lot of space for its overhead. As far as files go, most will likely be videos. I do have other files but when compared to the number of videos, they are close to nothing. The files system for the current 1Tb, spread across two drives with LVM, uses about 75Gbs for the file system thingy. That's a pretty good bit to me. I may lose more than 200Gbs on this 3Tb drive. O_O Thanks. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Mon, 06 Aug 2012 06:25:19 -0500, Dale wrote: While I am at it. You should have a good answer for this one. What is a good file system for this sort of thing? I been using ext4 but it sure does use a lot of space for its overhead. My MythTV box used XFS, but I use ext4 on newer systems. If you're only storing data on it, create the filesystem with the -m 0 option to make all the space available. -- Neil Bothwick There is always one more imbecile than you counted on. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
What I have on there is videos. When I tried to compress some and test, it was basically the same size. I guess videos don't compress to much? No videos don't compress well at all, compressing video files is just a waste of cpu cycles :) When I put this in, I'm going to redo the whole thing. Ages ago when I was green all over and not just around the gills, I created a /data directory and that is where I stored stuff. My new plan, the new drive will become /home and I will be putting things where they should have been to begin with. I plan to reorganize this whole mess I created ages ago. That video directory is HUGE tho. root@fireball / # du -shc /data/Videos/ 703G/data/Videos/ 703Gtotal root@fireball / # While I am at it. You should have a good answer for this one. What is a good file system for this sort of thing? I been using ext4 but it sure does use a lot of space for its overhead. As far as files go, most will likely be videos. I do have other files but when compared to the number of videos, they are close to nothing. The files system for the current 1Tb, spread across two drives with LVM, uses about 75Gbs for the file system thingy. That's a pretty good bit to me. I may lose more than 200Gbs on this 3Tb drive. O_O I use XFS on my NAS-Box for the drives that only hold video files and I am pretty happy with it. The advantage of XFS is, that it is very fast when working with large files. For everything else I use ext4, pretty happy with that too.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Monday 06 Aug 2012 12:25:19 Dale wrote: What I have on there is videos. When I tried to compress some and test, it was basically the same size. I guess videos don't compress to much? Not without transcoding the streams into more space efficient formats - but you could well suffer from loss of quality (lossy formats and digital generation losses). So YMMV. While I am at it. You should have a good answer for this one. What is a good file system for this sort of thing? I been using ext4 but it sure does use a lot of space for its overhead. As far as files go, most will likely be videos. I do have other files but when compared to the number of videos, they are close to nothing. The files system for the current 1Tb, spread across two drives with LVM, uses about 75Gbs for the file system thingy. That's a pretty good bit to me. I may lose more than 200Gbs on this 3Tb drive. O_O That sounds like a lot! I'm waiting to see what others comment and benchmarks. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Monday 06 Aug 2012 11:48:50 Hinnerk van Bruinehsen wrote: On 06.08.2012 12:14, Dale wrote: Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: What do you gain if you abuse your drive so hard that its lifetime is severly impacted? That if it has a problem that will cause it to fail soon in it's life, then I can find it soon. Remember that curve about failures? I would like to get past that first part of the curve. Maybe by the time I get to the later part, I'll have another drive or some backup scheme. Most the failures I have read about in reviews for this drive were early or was just plain old DOA. Testing it will get me past that. I'd rather it fail before I get my data on it instead of after. I thought I posted why I wanted to do this in my first post. Dale :-) :-) Why not simply get you data on it and use it for about 2 weeks? Maybe you should mirror important stuff to the old drive for that time. After about 2 weeks of normal usage you should be well out of the beginnig of that bathtub curve (I always had problems when copying data to the new drive when I had a bad one, except DOA of course). The 'Conveyance self-test routine' of smartmontools will check for damage during physical transport. If it is completely DOA, then that ought to be obvious I guess. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Howdy, I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way. Should be here Wednesday. I have seen some reviews where it would not work right. I think some of it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large. Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up to the task before putting my data on it. It's going to be so much data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point. Come on, 2 to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs. Really? lol Maybe a external drive later on but for now, well. I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal. I wouldn't want to torture the drive, but just make sure it works. What I do: boot parted magic liveCD, run ATA SECURE ERASE on the drive (you probably need to suspend and awaken your machine to unlock the drive, the GUI tool in the liveCD does this for you automatically), that will do factory reformat/low-level reformat, then run SMART full test which can take many hours. If it survives both of those, and doesn't make audible clicking noises in the process, I feel confident that it is in working order. Those steps are more important if I'm testing a used or refurbished drive, for a new drive you may want to skip the secure erase and only do the smart test. If SMART test passes then I don't think there's any reason to run badblocks, but you can have it run during mkfs if you want reassurance.
[gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Howdy, I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way. Should be here Wednesday. I have seen some reviews where it would not work right. I think some of it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large. Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up to the task before putting my data on it. It's going to be so much data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point. Come on, 2 to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs. Really? lol Maybe a external drive later on but for now, well. I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal. Thanks Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
On Kindle so hard to answer in depth. What about smartctl??? Let the drive test itself.
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Dale writes: I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way. Should be here Wednesday. I have seen some reviews where it would not work right. I think some of it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large. Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up to the task before putting my data on it. It's going to be so much data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point. Come on, 2 to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs. Really? lol Maybe a external drive later on but for now, well. I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal. smartctl -t long /dev/sdb will make the drive start a selftest. This will take a while, and even more if the drive is being used otherwise, as this test should not impact its performance. Use smartctl -l selftest to view the results. As long as there is no number in the 'LBA_of_first_error' column, it should be okay. That is a reading test only, badblocks -sw /dev/sdb will make it perform a write-mode test. It uses four different patterns, I would be okay with only one test, so I'd either stop it when it is done writing and comparing the first pattern, or supply a test pattern with option -t. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
hi Dale wrote, at 08/05/2012 04:45 PM: Howdy, I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal. some time ago i have played with bonnie++ to figure out my hard disk performance using different filesystems and io schedulers. the script invokes 3 bonnie instances; each instance runs its own set of tests: write/read/rewrite a 30gb file followed with different file operations on 48k small files spread over 32 sub-directories: #!/bin/bash # scratch=${1:-$(pwd)} # date ft=$(df -Pl $scratch|tail -1|awk '{print $6}') mnt=($(mount|grep $ft )) dev=$(basename $(readlink -fn ${mnt[0]})) sched=$(cat /sys/block/$dev/queue/scheduler|sed -e 's/.*\[//1' -e 's/\].*//1') log=$dev-${sched}-${mnt[4]} echo $log rm -f ${log} ${log}.html /usr/sbin/bonnie++ -p 3 /usr/sbin/bonnie++ -qd $scratch -n48:128K:16K:32 -ys -s30g -mg1 ${log} /usr/sbin/bonnie++ -qd $scratch -n48:128K:16K:32 -ys -s30g -mg2 ${log} /usr/sbin/bonnie++ -qd $scratch -n48:123K:16K:32 -ys -s30g -mg3 ${log} wait /usr/sbin/bonnie++ -p -1 bon_csv2html ${log} ${log}.html date this script worked around 30mins on a sata3 1tb drive. presuming your 3tb, you may adjust the file size and/or number of bonnie instances to fill up the disk space; then start the script and leave it running for a day. i guess this test would be brutal enough and on completion the disk might be considered good :) victor