usb hard drive diagnosis
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I'm a bit concerned about the health status of my usb based hard disk
backup. One of my recent backups (rsync) prematurely exited with I/O
errors in syslog. I fsck'ed the drive, fixing some 2000 errors like
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Free inodes count wrong for group #1535 (11199, counted=11196).
Fix? yes
Directories count wrong for group #1535 (416, counted=419).
Fix? yes
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and bitmap differences.
I did a new backup to the drive and it seems everything went fine. I
also checked some of the data on the disk with git-fsck for consistency.
What concerns me a bit is that after each backup, when I force a new
fsck, I get this:
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e13-v15:~# e2fsck -f /dev/disk/by-label/maxtor
e2fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 3A: Optimizing directories
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
maxtor: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
maxtor: 5059092/61063168 files (0.7% non-contiguous), 97098262/122096000
blocks
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(the filesystem was modified line). I don't recall seeing this line too
often in the past.
Does this indicate problems with the disk?
Unfortunately, smartmontools won't work with usb and I hesitate to break
the warranty seal to mount the disk directly.
Are there any other tools to check the health status of a usb disk?
Is fsck.ext3's badblocks option (-c) useful for usb disks or is it
somehow inefficiently interfering with the usb transmission and/or the
disk's internal controller?
Thanks for helping to make me sleep better ;-)
Cheers,
Johannes
NB: The disk contains several hundred GB of data and each backup is
created with hard linking to the previous one.
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