On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 10:36 PM, Raja Subramanian
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Arun Khan <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Any ideas / pointers before I RMA this disk to WDC?
>
> When in doubt, always RMA disks and ask questions later :-)

Yes, I am going to do as it still under warranty.

>
> In your case, it would also be prudent to check that the controller
> and cables are also in order.  Connect a different disk to this port
> and ensure that it passes disk IO tests without errors.  Connect this
> suspect WD disk to a different computer and try to reproduce these
> errors to confirm if this is a disk issue.
>

An update:

I installed the WDC hdd on another system and to be fair to the
manufacturer, I downloaded WDC DOS based disk check tool (runs on
FREEDOS).  The short test found some error which flashed on the
screen, it immediately switched to an extended test mode which ran for
about 35 mins.  At the end it said everything was fine with the disk.
Yet, when I boot that system with a Linux System Rescue CD, smartctl
reports the same errors as in my server.  I conclude that disk is
kaput.

Repeated this experiment with Seagate's DOS disk checker on a bad
Seagate hdd (smartctl reports other types of error on this disk) and
it not find anything wrong with the Seagate disk either!

It makes one wonder how truthful the manufacturer's tools are.   I
suspect the manufacturer's utilities check for bad blocks and do not
look at the SMART registers for errors logged there in because with
"badblocks"  I do not get any bad sector errors with either hdd.

>From above testing with the manufacturer's utility and  smartctl
reports, I am inclined to believe the errors reported by smartctl and
mdadm.

-- Arun Khan
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