On Sat, 4 Jul 2009, Carlos E. R. wrote:-
On Saturday, 2009-07-04 at 18:29 +0100, David Bolt wrote:
...
There are also the SMART tests, using smartctl, or the utility from the manufacturer. Format is irrelevant, and can be tested "live".
And those tests can take considerably less time than a run through with badblocks. Only problem is it doesn't test the drive surface, but does tell you if the drive thinks it's failing.
It depends on the manufacturer and the date; seagates do.
I think we may not be thinking about the same thing here. I was thinking about the SMART tests when I said they don't do a surface scan. I know the manufacturers utilities do because I've used a couple of them. The last on a 200GB Maxtor that decided to die very nastily just outside its warranty period. Even using the utility to reformat the drive didn't help and, after it complained that the drive had failed, it was totally disassembled and trashed. As for what happened with that drive, after several system crashes I looked into what was going on with it and found there were several hundred sectors that had gone bad and weren't able to be re-mapped. These bad sectors were smack bang in the middle of the swap partition, and within 2GB of the start of the drive. As the system occasionally used a large amount of swap, sometimes it would try reading/writing to one of these bad sectors and would result in a crash. Sometimes it was just the application that died, and sometimes it brought the system down. Regards, David Bolt -- Team Acorn: http://www.distributed.net/ OGR-NG @ ~100Mnodes RC5-72 @ ~1Mkeys/s openSUSE 10.3 32b | openSUSE 11.0 32b | | openSUSE 10.3 64b | openSUSE 11.0 64b | openSUSE 11.1 64b | RISC OS 3.6 | RISC OS 3.11 | openSUSE 11.1 PPC | TOS 4.02 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org