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

Wed Nov 3 20:20:24 UTC 2010
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On Wednesday, November 03, 2010 02:25:17 pm Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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.

I had a 1.5TB SATA drive pop up an error in Fedora 13 the other day; SMART had detected large numbers of bad (but remapped) sectors (53, to be exact), and Fedora 13 at least will warn you in GNOME when that is the case.  Hopefully RHEL6 will include some of the tools that F13 has in palimpsest, as the ability to run the short and long self tests in an easy fashion is down right cool.

I ran the manufacturer's utility, but it gave the drive a clean bill of health, and thus I couldn't get an RMA, even though the drive is in warranty.