On 06/21/2013 11:57 AM, Paul Smith issued this missive:
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 7:46 PM, Chris Adams <linux@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
To me, it is a bit surprising how the failure of the hard disk can be
predicted (and with a time projection)!
One of the lines you listed was the "reallocated sector count".
Basically, when you buy a 500G drive, it really has more space than
that. Some of the sectors are reserved and not reported to the system.
When the drive detects a bad sector, it relocates it to one of the
reserved sectors. Once it has relocated a certain number, it reports
the drive as failing (possibly because it is out of reserved sectors to
use).
I have already done a full backup. Should I wait for some days to
check out whether the alarm is true or not?
Given there were a bunch of reallocated sectors, I'd replace it as soon
as possible and then destroy it.
Thanks, Chris, for your very useful clarification -- I now understand
better the things at issue.
The warnings from smartctl aren't guarantees the drive is dying, but
that there's a high probability that it will at some point in the very
near future. If you get an alert, the standard recommendation is to
back up your data and get a new drive ASAP.
Think of the warning as the "check engine" light on a car. If it goes
on, it could mean something as innocuous as you're out of windscreen
washer fluid to "your gearbox fell out on the tarmac two miles back."
Either way, you need to look at the output from the ODB2 scanner to see
what's really wrong. The Linux equivalent of the OBD2 scanner is the
"smartctl -a -H /dev/sdX" command.
Based on that info, you can decide if you must replace the drive
immediately or if you can wait a bit. Given the relatively low cost of
new drives, I'd replace it sooner rather than later. In fact, when I
see a "deal" on drives, I'll buy a couple so I can have spares for just
this sort of situation. I believe in a belt and suspenders as far as my
data is concerned.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx -
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- from both sides. --A.M. Greeley -
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