[ale] what exactly does a long smart hdd test do?

[Scott Castaline]

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On 05/13/2012 07:42 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> 
> I have thoroughly enjoyed this thread. Lot's of stuff going around
> that in my desire for brevity sums up as:
> 
> If any tool start reporting a drive failure, make backups now while
> the new drive is being delivered or picked up. Once failed, a drive
> is not data safe to use as a drive and should be considered as
> nothing more than metal for recycling. There is no tool that can
> bring a drive back into reliable service. Any software maker that
> claims to be able to "repair a bad drive" is blowing smoke up a
> kilt. At most they can relocate bits from a failing sector to
> another location. The failing sector(s) is(are) not fixable.
> 
> I had 4 drives in my main home desktop. SMART data said two of them
> were failing. I did not see this data as I did not look. There were
> date stamps on the data that indicated those drives reached their
> state of impending failure about 2 years before I read the SMART
> data. During those 2 years, I noticed no problems nor lost any
> data. Once I notice the state of the drives, I migrated the
> contents (with tar, not dd) to a new drive and pulled those drives
> from service. About 6 months later I needed a drive to be an
> intermediary storage point for a temp processes and I pulled one of
> those from the junk pile. I ran badblocks on it and it reported a
> pile of repairs. I then formatted it. At the end of the format the
> drive utility in Fedora popped up and began spewing SMART data
> failure messages. The relocated blocks count had exceeded what the 
> SMART process could hold. I reworked the drive with badblocks and 
> partitioned it to avoid the failed areas. The SMART subsystem was
> still unimpressed with my attempt at dodging failures and STILL
> puked errors out. In short, I was able to partition around the
> multiple failed areas and my drive went from 250GB to about 80GB
> usable.
> 
> At this point I went to MicroCenter and bought a new drive. The
> old drive is now in pieces having surrendered it's positioning
> magnets to my son and the platter will become a nice wind chime. --
> 
Platters make good clock faces too ;-)
> -- James P. Kinney III
> 
> As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted
> to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can
> do as they please, and those who survive will be left to
> contemplate the outcome. - ////2011 Noam Chomsky
> 
> http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/ ////
> 
> 
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