On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Michael Butash
<michael@butash.net> wrote:
I was curious if anyone else is using the new 4096 byte drives vs. the old/standard-for-ever disks effectively under linux?
I've bought almost exclusively hitachi drives for years, but as far as smart reports I've had 2 separate disks recently almost immediately start throwing smart fail errors under ubuntu out of the retail box. One was a 3tb 7200rpm disk, and the other a 4tb.
Obviously I'm not happy about this as neither were cheap, but the 3tb I'd *extracted forcefully* from an enclosure after working poorly via usb (ie. warranty went poof), but the second was a boxed retail disk from frys. Not newegg oem's clanking against each other in transit in either circumstance so I'm not sure they were *both* broken.
I've been occasionally using the 4tb as a temp disk for extracting very large files in sabnzb as a test, and smart is getting worse and worse as I do. I eventually had to disable the alerts or come home to hundreds of them on my screen via osd-notify. It will later show green again. I really can't tell if it's false like a firmware bug or controller incompatibility issue.
My caveat is I have a esata el-cheapo sil3132 card driving sata2 to it, so the disk is already running in backward compatibility, but I find nothing related to issues with this so far, and it's worked for years with old 512 byte drives just fine.
Anyone run into something like this? I'm intending to move and try it internal off an internal bridge interface, but I only have sata2 available currently. I have a new mobo with more sata3 that will allow me to try it on there too soon.
Maybe my luck is just crap, but then again not everyone runs linux so I take it with a grain of salt as I don't see an outpouring of windoze users saying it too. Maybe since acquisition by WD they have returned to the "deathstar" spin on the deskstar series.
Thanks in advance!
-mb
Smartd is known to be buggy under certain distro releases and with certain drives and controllers.
Running /usr/sbin/smartctl -H /dev/hda, will tell you if the drive passes the health check, however, the ultimate test of the drive is via drive testing utilities and you will see there are no errors on the disks. [PLEASE POST the OUTPUT to smartctl HERE]!
In these cases, everyone turns off smartd reporting, while leaving kernel critical messages escalated to the console.
However, before we make assumptions, we need to see your smartctl output; this could also be an issue with your hardware controller, motherboard, unconditioned power or power supply. We would also want to evaluate your exact errors against known smartd issues of your distro version.
Reference: