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Re: impending disk failure?

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On 17/10/15 17:47, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Dominique Dumont wrote:
>> On Saturday 17 October 2015 14:15:52 Tony van der Hoff wrote:
>>> Can anyone please explain what it means, and whether I should be
>>> worried?
>> You should check the drive with smartctl.
>>
>> See http://www.smartmontools.org/
>>
>> HTH
>>
> Yes.. and be sure to go beyond the basic tests.
>
> First off, make sure it's running:
> smartctl -s on -A /dev/disk0   ;for each drive, and using the
> appropriate /dev/..
>
> Then after, it's accumulated some stats:
> smartctl -A /dev/disk0
>
> For a lot of drives, the first line - raw read errors, can be very
> telling - anything other than 0, and your disk is failing.
> Start-up-time can be telling, if it's increasing.
>
> The thing is, that most drives, except those designed for use in RAID
> arrays, mask impending disk failures, by re-reading blocks multiple
> times - they often get the data eventually, but your machine keeps
> getting slower and slower.
>


Thanks Miles, and tomás, for your helpful replies.

I apologise for the delay in replying, but I've been away from my desk a 
few days.

I have however been doing some extensive googling, and it would appear 
that the raw read error count is something of a red herring, especially 
when applied to Seagate drives, as these are. Both my drives have quite 
high (in the millions) of RREC; numbers which are precisely matched by 
the Hardware ECC Recovered counts, suggesting that the RREC is merely an 
artifact od HHDs being essentially a mechanical device, being pushed to 
its limits using clever technology. The SMART extended tests reveal no 
problems.

The Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. is 
particularly informative in the relative importance of these error 
counts; the RREC can be safely ignored, as somebody else here recently 
suggested.

So, back to the original problem; I think tomás hit the nail on the 
head. I've re-plugged the SATA cables, to no great effect; I have now 
ordered a couple of new cables, and will see whether that helps.

Thanks again to  all.



-- 
Tony van der Hoff        | mailto:tony@vanderhoff.org
Buckinghamshire, England |

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Thread

impending disk failure? Tony van der Hoff <tony@vanderhoff.org> - 2015-10-17 15:20 +0200
  Re: impending disk failure? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2015-10-17 17:00 +0200
  Re: impending disk failure? Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> - 2015-10-17 18:50 +0200
    Re: impending disk failure? Dominique Dumont <dod@debian.org> - 2015-10-18 10:40 +0200
      Re: impending disk failure? Himanshu Shekhar <irm2015006@iiita.ac.in> - 2015-10-18 10:50 +0200
    Re: impending disk failure? Tony van der Hoff <tony@vanderhoff.org> - 2015-10-20 12:10 +0200
      Re: impending disk failure? Ondřej Grover <ondrej.grover@gmail.com> - 2015-10-20 12:30 +0200
        Re: impending disk failure? Tony van der Hoff <tony@vanderhoff.org> - 2015-10-20 12:40 +0200
      Re: impending disk failure? Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> - 2015-10-20 15:50 +0200
  Re: impending disk failure? Dominique Dumont <dod@debian.org> - 2015-10-17 18:50 +0200
  Re: impending disk failure? Mirko Parthey <mirko.parthey@web.de> - 2015-10-20 14:30 +0200

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