[NTLUG:Discuss] [Fwd: Re: Troubling hard disk behavior]

[Leroy Tennison]

Preston Hagar wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 11:19 PM, Leroy Tennison
> <leroy_tennison at prodigy.net> wrote:
>> Running SuSE 10.3 with a Seagate Barracuda ST3250620A drive.  Twice on
>> boot up GRUB paused for a significant length of time at stage1 but
>> eventually booted.  Today during the init scripts I got a time out
>> waiting for one of the partitions to presumably mount.  I am running the
>> smartd daemon.
>>
>> Running smartctl as root with -H reports "PASSED" for the drive and "-l
>> error" states that there is no error log.  The current drive was
>> purchased relatively recently when these tools presented a "drive
>> failing" message to me one day.
>>
>> Any ideas as to what could be wrong?  Yes, I ***DID*** back up my data
>> when these events took place...
>>
> 
> One more thing you might use to test the drive would be HD Sentinel.
> 
> http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel_linux.php
> 
> The linux version is free.  What it does is take all of the SMART
> information and give you an average, instead of a PASS/FAIL.  A lot of
> times I have had it predict a drive on its way out while SMART still
> said it was fine.  Apparently, SMART is fairly boolean that although
> you could have a lot of bad sectors, high temps or other issues, as
> long as no single issue is over the given threshold, then the drive is
> considered a PASS.  Some of the thresholds can only be reached if the
> drive actually fails!  HD Sentinel takes all of the SMART data and
> uses an algoritim they came up with to create a score on a scale of
> 0-100 on the health of your drive.  This might give you a better idea
> if your drive is having to remap a lot of bad sectors or has other
> problems.
> 
> I know this isn't a exact reply to your question, but I just thought I
> would share a really nice free tool I have found in terms of
> monitoring drives.
> 
> Preston

(Didn't realize that my reply was only to Preston, forwarding)

Well, I downloaded it and it ran fine.  Power on time was less than 62
days with an estimated remaining time of more than a 1000 days.  "The
hard disk status is PERFECT."  The motherboard is an ASUS P4S533-VM,
never had any trouble with it.

Any other ideas from anyone?