On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > > John R Pierce wrote: > > Les Mikesell wrote: > >> If you can see activity lights, you can 'cat /dev/sd? >/dev/null' to > >> make them busy, one at a time (where ? is a, b, c, etc). > >> > > > > hahaha, I've done that, only my version is... > > > > # dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=512 > > > > but, same difference > > It's unfortunately about the best we've got when device names are > assigned more or less randomly. NICs are even worse - we need a command > to make the lights blink there too. > > -- > Les Mikesell at gmail.com > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos Fully second that. The dd read test is the best way to tell which drive is starting to fail. As soon as one does it is not a bad idea to replace it. Note that sometimes SMART drive and such technologies fail to detect missing sectors even when the dd test stumples upon them. Boris.