Re: usb hard drive diagnosis
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 1:07 AM, Johannes Wiedersich
<johannes@physik.blm.tu-muenchen.de> wrote:
> 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
Ow. That seems like a lot. :(
> maxtor: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
> maxtor: 5059092/61063168 files (0.7% non-contiguous), 97098262/122096000
> blocks
Tnat in and of itself doesn't indicate that there is a problem with
the drive. I've frequently (well maybe hopefully not that often) had
to run that kind of filesystem check - even in 'manual fsck' mode
where the system only will partially boot up and not continue until
fhe filesystem is correctly checked through all five passes.
I've had a few drives in service for years (retired ibm deskstar 30gb
etc.) they should still work even though I've had to fsck them a few
times.
> Unfortunately, smartmontools won't work with usb and I hesitate to break
> the warranty seal to mount the disk directly.
Hmm perhaps this is true, since I don't have any USB hard drive media,
but I would think they fall into two distinct types:
* flash (RAM) drives
* enclosures that are basically a standard sata or ide drive with a
power and usb cable added
For #2 I'm not sure why you couldn't treat it more like a regular HD
except for the USB part gets in the way (it's slower in terms of file
I/O through a USB bus instead of a more standard ide or SATA
connection.
But why wouldn't things like smartmontools work through the USB?
Reply to: