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

[Jim Kinney]

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.
-- 
-- 
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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