[ale] The perpetual question: best current HDD?

[Derek Atkins]

"Ron Frazier (ALE)" <atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> writes:

> Kinda like asking what's the best car.
>
> Anyway, I've always liked Seagate.  Still look for 5 yr warranties.  They're getting harder to find but some are still out there.  Blast the new drives before putting them into service with a SpinRite Level 4 test several times or a badblocks DESTRUCTIVE write test several times.  Each cycle through badblocks writes then reads 0000, 1010, 0101, 1111.  Each cycle takes about 3 days on a 1 TB drive.  I'd run at least 2 cycles.  More or less comparable SpinRite activity would be 6 - 8 repeats through the entire drive.  SpinRite is non destructive.  Note that the badblocks NONDESTRUCTIVE read write test can be run with data on the drive.  In this case, badblocks reads the data, writes a random value, reads it, then rewrites the original data, which is Similar to what SpinRite does.  If using badblocks NONDESTRUCTIVE read write test, I would run 6 - 8 passes.

Yep, I always run "badlocks -w" on my drives prior to putting them in
service.  I've also modified unraid's preclear_disk to also work hard on
the disk and I use that, too.

> Based on other discussions here, I would recommend doing background
> data scrubbing on the RAID array to force each drive to read every
> sector once or twice a year.  Read / write testing is even better.
> You can manually do this a couple of times per year with Spinrite or
> Badblocks.  Routine file systems checks are a good idea too.

Fedora has a background cron job to do this:
/etc/cron.weekly/99-raid-check
You just need to enable /etc/sysconfig/raid-check

Of course I only just now checked my mismatch_cnt's on my md devices and
see:

[root at vmhost ~]# cat /sys/block/md*/md/mismatch_cnt
128
195200
4224
139392

....  So not sure what to do now :-/
They are each RAID-1 devices, combined into RAID-10 using LVM.

> I would also recommend using gsmartcontrol to turn on all the smart
> monitoring that is available on the drive.  Check that all the smart
> stats are good before putting it on line, after stress testing it,
> particularly reallocated sectors.  Set up a way to monitor the smart
> parameters on an ongoing basis and receive alarms if they get out of
> line.  It wouldn't be a bad idea to monitor temperature too.  Drives
> cannot take as much heat as CPU's in general.  I think they start
> getting unhappy around 50 deg C.

Yeah, I have smartd turned on for all the drives and set to email me on
major issues.  They run a short test every night, and a long test every
week.  And of course logwatch sends out interesting stuff every night,
too.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available