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!
