[lug] Data integrity problems on new machine

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 06:46:25PM -0600, Archer Sully wrote:
>I have a 9G IBM SCSI drive in my Solaris box that clearly 
>has a bad spot on it that got through testing.  No real 
>complaints, it just silently gives I/O errors.  It happens.
>The unit is brand-spanking-new.

It's not unusual for hard drives to have bad spots on them.  It *IS*
unusual for them not to get picked up automaticly and added to the bad
block map, however.  It should happen automaticly, but I believe there
are some Solaris tools for doing it manually if you have the blocks that
are suspect.  Running a nice "badblocks" on it in write-mode can be a
good thing...

>Come to think of it, the bad drive I had last summer was
>also an IBM.  I think I'm going to avoid IBM drives from
>now on. 

That's interesting.  Over the last couple of years I've gotten probably
on the order of 50 IBM hard drives, and have had problems with two of
them.  One of them had a bad bearing out of the box.  It actually
worked fine, but sounded bad.  The other one was an IDE drive in efm's
machine that was giving errors.  I haven't run badblocks on it to verify
that yet though.

I really like IBM drives.  First of all, that failure rate is pretty good,
compared to other drives I've used.  Secondly, the return I had to do above
was a nice story.  I had just purchased 3 9GB 7200RPM SCSI drives from NECX
(they've unfortunately turned rather evil).  It was squealing out of the box.
I called NECX and they wouldn't send me a replacement, they told me to call
IBM and then proceeded to give me the wrong number.  After an hour on the
phone to the IBM general info line, I finally got the right number.

Their storage support answered the phone right away, and was ready to do an
RMA until they found out the drive was bad out of the box.  "If we do an
RMA, you'll get a refurbished drive.  You should contact your vendor."
"I did, they told me to call you."  "Oh?  Who was this and do you have their
phone number?"  I gave her the information.  "Can you hold for a moment?"

A few moments later, she was back "Hi, I've got John with NECX on the line.
He'll be happy to get you a replacement."  The down side is that NECX billed
me for the second drive as if I'd bought it, and took 6 weeks to process a
refund on the other drive.  Not like they said it would take a week, they said
it would take 6 weeks right up front.  I suspect they're living on the float...

Sean
-- 
 "I feel so insignificant...  Like people are laughing at me."
 "You--You ARE a clown..."  -- Bob Newhart
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python