[ale] OT: Hard drive errors

[Scott Castaline]

On 02/26/2010 07:42 PM, Michael B. Trausch wrote:

>
> Every drive that I am aware of persists the values even across full
> power-cycles.  That said, it would not surprise me if there were drives
> that did not---as I understand it, not all drive vendors (even not all
> drives from a single vendor) treat all aspects of SMART in the same way.
>
> 	--- Mike
>

The reason I ask is that I just happen to check out the Palimpsest GUI 
utility that now comes with Fedora 12 and I noticed that these areas had 
high numbers for the Seagates and all 0's for my Western Digital drives. 
After several checks I wasn't sure if they were changing so the other 
day I started tracking. Took a reading on the 24th and again today, this 
is what I found:

	ATA3500630AS		SN: 6QG3BBY9	
Date            Read Error      Seek Error      High    Hardware ECC
                 Rate            Rate            Fly     Recovered
                                                 Write
02/24/2010	201,017,264	357,417,846	0	230,658,505
02/26/2010	49,946,990	359,451,599	0	132,332,646
----------------------------------------------------------------------				
	ATA3500410AS		SN: 5VM0LPVG	
Date            Read Error      Seek Error      High    Hardware ECC
                 Rate            Rate            Fly     Recovered
                                                 Write
02/24/2010	41,443,953	10,539,290	3	41,443,953
02/26/2010	15,105,818	10,672,130	3	15,105,818
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
	ATA3500418AS		SN: 6VM0LEDD	
Date            Read Error      Seek Error      High    Hardware ECC
                 Rate            Rate            Fly     Recovered
                                                 Write
02/24/2010	217,651,236	759,590	0	217,651,236
02/26/2010	219,037,030	837,731	0	219,037,030
------------------------------------------------------------------------

As you can see the 3rd drive incremented but the other 2 appeared to 
have reset, unless the counters reached their max and wrapped back 
around to 0. Assuming that 999,999,999 is the max then they are really 
having problems. I was planning to combine 2 of the drives as one 
LUKS/VG, but now I might wind up replacing all the Seagates with WD 
1.0TBs. I've sort of losing a newly regained faith in Seatrash and will 
be returning to WD.