Re: How to fix I/O errors?
On Monday 06 February 2017 10:22:54 Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
> David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> writes:
> > On 02/04/17 07:18, Ric Moore wrote:
> >> I'm looking at a Seagate 750 gig drive that went south on me with a
> >> pile of errors. Good luck getting Seagate to give a good gosh darn.
> >> In the past I have had mixed results replacing the drive
> >> motherboard. I saved two out of three. I doubt I will buy anything
> >> Seagate makes in the future.
> >
> > Everything electrical and mechanical fails. It's just a question of
> > when, followed by whether or not you're prepared.
> >
> >
> > I've found (and heard) that the worst thing I can do to a HDD is put
> > it on the shelf and let it rot. I've had more than a few that
> > failed shortly after being put into a computer.
>
> I hadn't heard this... I've got a drive I've been keeping as a cold
> spare. Am I better off (in the sense of "is it more likely to
> actually be useable when I need it") installing it and adding it to
> one of my RAID1 arrays? Can you point me to an article about it?
That cold spare will eventually develop stiction, seizing the parked haed
to the surface of the disk solidly enough that the disk motor cannot
break it loose to spin the disk up. Such is best treated by hooking up
the cables, but holding the drive in your hand so that you can turn on
the power, and within a couple seconds, give the drive a good sideways
blow on a corner with the ball of the wrist so the drive housing/casting
is caused to rotate a few degrees around the axis of the disk, breaking
the stiction so the spindle motor can spin it up. The theory is that the
drive frame rotates when you drive it by hitting the corner, but the
disk doesn't, breaking the stiction seal.
Based on my experience here, with terabyte drives, they seem to be better
off spinning even when not in active service. I have one old terabyte
drive thats had 25 bad, re-allocated clusters, since the first time I
had smartctl do an extended self test on it several years ago. It still
has 25 reallocated sectors this day, with (word wrapped):
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail
Always - 25
and
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 030 030 000 Old_age
Always - 61430
And that drive gets beat on every night as its my backup disk containing
all the virtual tapes amanda uses.
In terms of spin time, thats 6.997490303 years. And thats a Seagate
Barracuda drive, which has a horrible reputation according to these
mailing lists.
One secret though. When that drive was new to me, I went to the seagate
web site and downloaded a cd image for that model that updated its
firmware. As I already had a linux install on it, I applied it to that
drive with a bit of trepidation. But worry wasn't needed, I didn't lose
a byte of the install. But a side benefit was that the drives speed was
nearly doubled.
If you can afford the time, I highly recommend putting the latest
firmware in it before putting it in service. Who knows how long its been
on the dealers warehouse shelf, but the dealer bought 10,000 when they
were announced. And the initial shipment can be guaranteed to have been
bagged with Alpha rated firmware in it. Always update new drives is the
message from this elderly (82) user. You won't regret it.
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
Reply to: