[lug] best way to check a new hd that might be going bad

[George Sexton]

On 1/6/12 11:53 AM, karl horlen wrote:
> per my other recent post. 
>
>
> i just bought two 1T drives and installed them in a software raid 1 mirror in my server.  i'm already noticing a very high pitched whine that wasn't there with the older smaller drives.  it's doesn't sound super serious right now and appears to come and go but my guess is it's a harbinger of things to come. 
>
>
> i imagine i can remove one of the drives at a time from the array, pull the drive from the bay (supermicro type .. not sure if hot plug or not) and reboot to determine which drive is producing the noise.
>
> outside of that, are there any cmds / procedures the audience might recommend for determining the physical health of my drives?  like i said they're brand new and newly formatted.

You can use the SMART management tools to monitor the physical health of 
the drives. smartd and smartctl are the tools to use. They also support 
some testing capabilities while online.

>
> i would prefer to replace the drive if necessary before i restore my old server from backups.  or at a minimum, at least know what to expect going forward so i can prepare for it.
>
> if one drive goes down, since the entire system is living on a sw raid (two raid devices md0 and md1), i guess it's really a no-brainer to just slap a new drive in, partition correctly and let the array recover.  so perhaps, i just have to let the disk do it's thing and proceed through warranty if real errors start showing up.  it would save me from having to dban the drive though once it's configured.
>
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-- 
George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
303 438-9585
http://www.mhsoftware.com/