[ale] Seagate 1.5TB drives, bad blocks, md raid, lvm, and hard lock-ups

[Jim Kinney]

So evaluating cost/usable_GB shows these are infinitely expensive since
"usable_GB" = 0

:-(

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 3:54 PM, William Fragakis <william at fragakis.com>wrote:

> http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337
>
> sort by lowest rating first. Lots of interesting comments about these
> drives in RAID configs. Not that it would help you now but maybe it
> feels better to know you aren't alone.
>
> wf
>
> On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 15:09 -0500, Brian W. Neu wrote:
> > I have a graphic design client with a 2U server running Fedora 11 and
> > now 12 which is at a colo handling their backups.  The server has 8
> > drives with Linux md raids & LVM on top of them.  The primary
> > filesystems are ext4 and there is/was an LVM swap space.
> >
> > I've had an absolutely awful experience with these Seagate 1.5 TB
> > drives, returning 10 out of the original 14 due to the ever increasing
> > SMART "Reallocated_Sector_Ct" due to bad blocks.  The server that the
> > client has at their office has a 3ware 9650(I think) that has done a
> > great job of handling the bad blocks from this same batch of drives
> > and sending email notifications of one of the drives that grew more
> > and more bad blocks.  This 2U though is obviously pure software raid,
> > and it has started locking up.
> >
> > As a stabilizing measure, I've disable the swap space, hoping the
> > lockups were caused by failure to read/write from swap.  I have yet to
> > let the server run over time and assess if this was successful.
> >
> > However, I'm doing a lot of reading today on how md & LVM handle bad
> > blocks and I'm really shocked.  I found this article (which may be
> > outdated) which claimed that md relies heavily on the firmware of the
> > disk to handle these problems and when rebuilding an array there are
> > no "common sense" integrity checks to assure that the right data is
> > reincorporated back into the healthy array.  Then I've read more and
> > more articles about drives that were silently corrupting data.  It's
> > turned my stomach.  Btrfs isn't ready for a this, even though RAID5
> > was very recently incorporated.  And I don't see btrfs becoming a
> > production stable file system until 2011 at the earliest.
> >
> > Am I totally wrong about suspecting bad blocks for causing the
> > lock-ups?  (syslog records nothing)
> > Can md RAID be trusted with flaky drives?
> > If it's the drives, then other than installing OpenSolaris and ZFS,
> > how to I make this server reliable?
> > Any experiences with defeating mysterious lock-ups?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > ------------------------------SMART Data-----------------------------
> > [root at victory3 ~]# for letter in a b c d e f g h ; do echo /dev/sd
> > $letter; smartctl --all /dev/sd$letter |grep Reallocated_Sector_Ct;
> > done
> > /dev/sda
> >   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail
> > Always       -       8
> > /dev/sdb
> >   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail
> > Always       -       1
> > /dev/sdc
> >   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail
> > Always       -       0
> > /dev/sdd
> >   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail
> > Always       -       0
> > /dev/sde
> >   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail
> > Always       -       1
> > /dev/sdf
> >   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail
> > Always       -       0
> > /dev/sdg
> >   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail
> > Always       -       1
> > /dev/sdh
> >   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail
> > Always       -       0
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
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