--On January 9, 2006 10:20:07 PM -0500 Dan MacNeil <dan@thecsl.org> wrote:
I had similar errors, ignored them for 24 hours and then wowed our users with 24 hours of downtime restoring from backup. It was the drive. apt-get install smartmontools ...may allow the hard drive to tell you that is failing.
Never have I seen S.M.A.R.T. predict nor provide any hint of an impending failure. Usually the first signs were the DMA failures, all the while SMART reporting everything A/OK, and no errors logged until just before they finally died, then it'd usually log some.