Re: Hard disk going-bad detection

On 29/08/06, Matthew Hagerty <matthew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Greetings,

I have a hard drive that every now and then makes a sound like the head
is moving from one extreme to the other, then parking. It is hard to
explain, kind of a towk-kok-click with a metallic ring to it. If you
have heard a drive do this before, you know the sound. I heard a drive
do this to me a few months ago and it failed shortly thereafter.

I have 3 drives in the system so it is very hard to know which drive it
is, so in an attempt to get a new drive before the one fails out right,
is there any way I can test the drives in place? One drive is primarily
my system disk (20G), the second (120G) has /usr mounted on it, and the
third (120G) is mounted, rsync'd, umounted every night to make a backup
of the other two. So, the backup drive I can test no problem, even
destructively if necessary. However, the two that make up the active
system I would like to be able to test without disrupting normal
operation if possible? But, I'll take the box offline for a bit if
necessary. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.


Your setup is exactly identical to mine, even down to mount points and
disk sizes.

Try smartmontools, most drives support S.M.A.R.T so you should have
no trouble:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/sysutils/smartmontools/

It's useful for identifying drives that are about to die.

You shouldn't need to take the machine offline.

MC
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