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

Wed Nov 3 18:57:56 UTC 2010
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

RedShift wrote:
> On 11/03/10 19:04, 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
<snip>
>> 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.
>
> Auto relocation happens ONLY when writing to foobar sectors. The drive
> WILL NOT relocate sectors that you are reading from because it cannot
> trust the content.
>
> SMART reports the number of sectors that have been reallocated. That
> means, the drive was writing to a sector, found out it was unreliable and
> decided to remap that sector. It is not abnormal for drives to develop _a
> few_ bad sectors over the years.

Agreed. And these two bad sectors developed many months ago, and the
number is not increasing, so I'm not really worried about them; all I want
is to make the irritating messages in the logfiles go, and stay, away.

       mark