[CentOS] Alarming (?) smartd reports

[William L. Maltby]

On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 11:03 -0700, MHR wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 10:14 PM, nate <centos at linuxpowered.net> wrote:
> >
> > Download the manufacturer's tools and run a diagnostics on it,
> > it will tell you the truth about what's going on.
> >
> > I wouldn't trust any generic OS tools over the manufacturer's tools,
> ><snip>

> I was going to laugh this off 'cuz how many manufacturers support
> Linux, but I was pleasantly surprised, twice, when I found that a)
> Seagate does and b) the seatools for Linux produced no errors on the
> long test.

IIRC, the seatools just run the smart tools that come on CentOS/Linux.
Not the same as those on the DOS tools version. It's been several
months, but barring memory failures (mine, not the computer's  ;-) I
ended up downloading the DOS ones so that I could do the repair and run
the "real magilla".

> 
> It also told me lots of interesting information that I don't recall at
> the moment, not the least of which was that the drive does not support
> DST (the on-board diagnostics test), which I thought was odd.

Try the DOS version. I bet the lack of that support is in the standard
*IX smart tools, not the drive.

> <snip>

> One other thing that I find interesting: the drives that are showing
> smart errors are /dev/hdb and /dev/sda.  In order from oldest to
> newest, my drives are:
> 
> /dev/hdb - Maxtor 120GB PATA
> /dev/hda - Maxtor 160GB PATA
> /dev/sda - Seagate 300GB SATA
> /dev/sdb - WD 320GB SATA
> 
> The older of each of the PATA and SATA drives are the ones showing the
> errors....

If all drives left the factory in great shape, it is natural that the
older ones would show an error first. Often just a "weak" spot or two
that passed mfg tests and finally failed as they aged. That's why I
don't worry about them (I don't have data center servers to the world
here at home) as long as the repair utilities run successfully and then
no more show up for a long time. If they start coming in frequent
bursts, then it's time to act.

BTW, most warranty replacements are "reconditioned" drives that have
nothing more than diagnostics run and bad sectors reassigned. As long as
total capacity still meets advertised and the mechanics/electrics and
media (high %) are still good, they'll ship them.

> 
> Thanks.
> 
> mhr
> <snip sig stuff>

HTH
-- 
Bill