On Mon, 5 Mar 2007, Michael Stumpf wrote:
I'm trying to assemble an array (raid 5) of 8 older, but not yet old age ATA
120 gig disks, but there is intermittent flakiness in one or more of the
drives. Symptoms:
* Won't boot sometimes. Even after moving to 2 power supplies and monitoring
the amp spikes, sometimes I get "clicking" from 1-2 of the drives after the
startup.
* When initiating a SMART long test, so far two of them have:
+ passed 50-75% of the time
+ when "failed", didn't actually fail, just perpetually were stuck at
an arbitrary % of test remain.
+ If I cancel and restart the test, often they pass.
I've heard clicking from some drives when executing SMART long tests. Doing
4 drives at a time, but still can't
isolate and don't want to use laborious "sit and listen by computer" method
to determine which are dying--would prefer a tool to detect the issue.
I know there's a problem with one or more because my issues with my primary
array disappeared the minute I used LVM to remove these devices (and upgrade
to some larger/newer ones).
Two questions:
1) Is it smartest to isolate which drives are clicking and chuck them into
the wood chipper, given the circumstances?
2) Are there tools that are designed to determine if a drive is fit for
duty? dd_rescue et all seem focused on saving a dying drive; spinrite seems
to be controversial black magic marketing, etc. I could try the manufacturer
shipped tools but given their black box nature I have no idea how much (or
little) is being done by their tests. What do you folks recommend?
Thanks in advance.
--Michael Stumpf
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This is what I use:
799] What is the best way to verify a hard drive has no bad blocks?
/usr/bin/time badblocks -b 512 -s -v -w /dev/hdg
Note, this will wipe anything out on the drive.
There is also a non-destructive write, check the manpage for badblocks(8).
This operation usually takes 12 hours or so on a 400GB drive, if this
passes & short+long tests pass without error, the drive is probably OK for
the time being.
Also, what does smartctl -a /dev/hda for each of your drives show?
Justin.
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