[lug] Drive failure signs was Hard Drive Manufacturer Suggestion

[Matt Thompson]

On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 10:32 -0700, Mike Stanczyk wrote:
> With everyone sharing their hard drive horror stories and since
> I've lost a drive this month too, I wanted ask what symtoms
> people saw before their drive went to silcon heaven...
> 
> Strange sounds?
> Error messages in which system log?
> Strange smells?

Well, in one box at work I started getting slightly worse SMART messages
in logwatch.  Plus, the drive didn't seem to perform as well.  I don't
know how to quantify that last one, but using the thing everyday I kind
of felt some...slowness.

At home, I had a Deathstar that got the "click", and Dell gave me a
remanned Deathstar as a replacement.  That one lasted a good 5 years or
so.  But, the "click" came back this spring and I got to reinstall
Windows/Linux on a new drive.

My best failure occurred on my Alpha at work on it's main /-/boot drive.
That one was a spectacular (for me) failure.  It really didn't seem to
show many signs, when suddenly Tru64 throws up a magnificent EVM (Event
Manager) scream-mail to me, root, and all our Tru64 admins.  Oh, and the
drive kinda stopped working--and thus my box[1].  It was an amazing
failure; something important somewhere broke and it went in a second.
We got it to reboot and was able to get most of the important bits off
of it onto tape which bugged out on a partition that was luckily not too
important.  This is why I like to backup to tape after every major
trajectory ensemble run I do, in case it goes again.

Matt

[1] It was kinda cool...all the ssh logins to the box, a remote xload
perished, a web page I was browsing that was served by it.  All of it
gone and it was just so fast...
-- 
Learning just means you were wrong and they were right. - Aram
   Matt Thompson -- http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~thompsma/
   440 UCB, Boulder, CO  80309-0440
   JILA A510, 303-492-4662
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3325 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/pipermail/lug/attachments/20041207/1ebfcd5e/attachment.bin>