[CentOS] was, PATA Hard Drive woes, is "SMART"

Wed Nov 3 18:25:17 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 11/3/2010 1:04 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Warren Young wrote:
>> On 11/3/2010 11:27 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>>> Yeah, but I have problems with smartmon:
>>
>> More likely, problems with SMART.  S.M.A.R.T. is D.U.M.B. :)
>>
>> It's better than nothing, but sometimes not by a whole lot.
>>
>>> one server that's got two bad sectors, which SMART reports. I've
>>> followed the instructions on how to make the log messages go away, and
> fsck -c...
>>> but on reboot, SMART seems to ignore what badblocks found, and the
>>> irritating messages are back.
>>
>> It may be that SpinRite could fix that by forcing a remap.
>
> Dunno if we have SpinRite around here.
>>
>> Another option -- which I didn't mention because it probably isn't an
>> option for the original poster, but which may work with your servers --
>> is that some high-end RAID systems can do something like SpinRite at
>> level 4+, as can ZFS.  They call it resilvering.  I don't think these
>
> No joy - it's a plain SATA drive, the root drive on a server we use for
> backups. ext3, and no, I'm not going to change filesystem types.... The
> real thing is why does SMART ignore the results of badblocks (for those
> who aren't sure, that's invoked when you do fsck -c), and for that matter,
> why the drive (Seagate ST3170811AS) doesn't automagically relocate those
> blocks.

I think the point of SMART is to be aware of the physical conditions 
regardless of the logical remapping.  At some point you run out of 
places to relocate.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com