On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 9:28 AM, Anton Aylward
My desktop's 1T drive is approaching it's supposed EOL.
I realise that time was, the bathtub curve meant that if a drive worked it probably would keep on working, but modern economics seems to mean that a component dies the day after its warranty expires. So I'm apprehensive.
I see 2T and 3T drives no on sale for less than I paid for my 1T drive. Why I should consider them when I haven't filled my 1T drive I'm not clear. having a set of mirrored 1T makes more sense then a 2T on a single spindle.
I'm using LVM so migrating LVs from oe drive to another is not a problem.
HOWEVER ....
What I am concerned about is initial reliability.
My experience with new drives has never been good. It is one reason why I adopted LVM. The 1T drive I'm using is a replacement under warranty for a drive that threw an enormous amount of uncorrected bad blocks about a week into use. I still had the LVs on the older drive and had simply been mirroring. Upgrading from a 750G to a 1T meant that such problems showed up quickly.
But a step from the 1T to a 3T might leave a lot of space never considered.
Yes I know about the 'badblock' program. There are a few variants. But that isn't fast. I've used it on a 8G USB and it took a couple of days. OK that's USB not SATA speeds. But how long would it take to scan a 3T drive using the 'badblock' program?
TOO-OO-OO-OO-OO long!
A drives SMART capability should include some kind of scanning but I'm unclear as to how comprehensive it is. Can anyone fill me in on that?
Googling I see a few suggested ideas but they don't seem to reassure me about this question of a 'new drive'.
'smartctl -h /dev/sda' just says "PASSED" which is nice but not detailed. 'smartctl --all /dev/sda' tells me a lot but doesn't seem to tell me what I'm looking for.
I'm reluctant to try forcing a scan/test on my live drive. Is there a SMARTCTL command that does the equivalent of a 'badblocks' scan?
Sorry, But smartctl is the best tool out there and it will only report issues detected in the normal course of use. You need to access every sector if you want to know if the media is starting to fail. I would: smartctl --all > pre-scan.out dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=10M conv=noerror smartctl --all > post-scan.out Then compare your pre- and post- results to see if any serious concerns were found. Concerns would include correctable media errors, etc. Not just total failures. As to speed, if you can get 4GB/minute read speeds, you can read a TB in about 4 hours. I get as fast as 8GB/minute on 3 1/2 inch 7200 RPM modern large desktop drives. So that's a TB of reads in 2 hours. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org