Comments on: Test If Linux Server SCSI / SATA Hard Disk Going Bad

By: randomguy

randomguy — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 10:26:50 +0000

Bruno, SMART data is definitely worth paying attention to. Any one of 4 of the categories of errors listed needs only 1 error to increase the chance of a disk failure by 10 or more in the next 60 days. So, bad SMART data will certainly indicate that a drive should be replaced. However, drives can also fail without any warning too.

By: linux

linux — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:02:03 +0000

how do you get it out of read only?

By: icebrian

icebrian — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:20:08 +0000

Also pardon my ignorace, but could you check http://pastebin.com/m17a6af7b I have four drives there and I suspect one may-be two are faulty (no possible repair).

By: Vivek Gite

Vivek Gite — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:45:57 +0000

a healthy drive

By: mike

mike — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:32:20 +0000

Pardon my ignorance, but is your output that of a failing drive or a healthy drive? I have very similar output, after just dealing with filesystem problems fixed with e2fsck. My output http://paste.ubuntu.com/181613/ Thanks!

By: Zen of Linux

Zen of Linux — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:14:25 +0000

Thank you for your post! It was of great help while compiling my view on things, while testing capabilities of SMART to monitor my drives and if it is of any help to predict when a drive will die.

By: Brett Cave

Brett Cave — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:01:47 +0000

Badblocks has both “non-destructive” and “destructive” modes of testing (write vs read).

read the man page to avoid data loss. (I learnt the hard way:)

By: Karl O. Pinc

Karl O. Pinc — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 15:29:12 +0000

The badblocks utility, part of the e2fs suite of tools, is good way to test a drive. It is probably more through than the on-drive smart diagnostics, when run in write mode. The down side of write mode is that it destroys any existing data — although this can be an advantage if you wish to throughly remove all data from a drive. badblocks works on non-smart capable drives as well.

By: Jayesh

Jayesh — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 22:51:12 +0000

Really Thanks a lot for such usefull information. Thanks for sharing that.
Cheers..!!

By: vivek

vivek — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 16:43:29 +0000

Bruno,

Yes, no tool is perfect; admin must use on his/her experience while diagnosing a problem. I’m downloading and reading PDF.

Appreciate your post.

By: Bruno

Bruno — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 08:07:17 +0000

Don’t expect too much from SMART : Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pinheiro.pdf
We present data collected from detailed observations of a large disk drive population in a production Internet services deployment
… models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. …