Re: how to find bad blocks
Vadkan Jozsef put forth on 2/9/2010 11:44 AM:
> Besides the badblocks app?
>
> We have a samsung hdd, that keeps falling out of raid, but there are no
> bad blocks on it, according to "badblocks" prog.
This is probably because there are no bad blocks on it.
> we would like to return it [warranty], but it would be better to find
> e.g. bad blocks on it..:\ :D
If "falling out of raid" means your hardware PCI/X/e/mobo mounted "real" RAID
card is taking this drive "off line", usually this is because of a firmware
issue. The firmware on the RAID card doesn't want to play with the firmware on
the drive. This most often happens when a drive of dissimilar
brand/make/model/size/fw_rev is added into an existing array of identical
drives, or a group of identical drives is used but the controller doesn't like
the drive firmware rev, period. In either case, "good" drives will be kicked
off line by the controller. I went through a wacky case of this back in the
late 1990s with Mylex DAC960 cards kicking Seagate ST118202LC drives off-line
once a week (or more). Five DAC960s and 40 identical drives. Those DAC960s
just didn't like that ST118202 firmware. These were U2W 80MB/s drives and the
DAC960s were limited to UW or 40MB/s. Both Mylex and Seagate tech support said
this was not the problem, that is was a firmware bug in the drives unrelated to
bus speed. Took a while but we eventually got all the drives replaced. That is
the most array rebuilding I've ever done, or probably ever will.
To get RMA authorization in this situation usually only requires telling the
vendor what RAID controller you're using and what drive configuration. It
always helps if you bought all components from the same vendor, and helps even
more if you got a verbal or written commitment that the card and drives would
work together in the configuration you had planned. If it's a low ball no name
vendor that doesn't sell both RAID cards and drives, they may tell you to ____
yourself, that the drive is fine. This is one huge disadvantage of using low
end vendors and why corporations usually buy the bulk of their hardware from a
single vendor.
--
Stan
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