[Gllug] OT: Warning - new WD portable drives!

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2011, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:

[snipped]

> I'm not sure moving the caddy electronics onto the main board would
> make them much more reliable though and it definitely does get in the
> way of direct ATA access and therefore negatively impact the use of
> several recover and diagnostic tools :/

My experience of dealing with ATA/SATA disks and using smartmon utils:

(years back) Grudgingly needing to compile from src a bleeding edge
kernel with the new (at the time) sata device support included the ATA
pass through to enable a (also bleeding edge) smartmon tools package to
be able to pull out stats from the drives.

Seeing errors in smartctl consistently for a drive making me always
nervous of it, but then years pass by without any actual issues (used it
as a scratch disk).

Seeing actual signs of disk errors (syslog showing disk issues like bus
timeouts/system reboots spontaneously and files are missing) but
smartctl showing nothing wrong at all. then a few days later sudden disk
failure (clicking and hanging the bus).

Always having to scroll around from the overly verbose output looking
for a simple "drive is okay" VS "drive has few spare blocks left and is
on its way out" indication.


So, I'm not a fan of smartmontools.  Does anyone have better anecdotes?

- Damion
--
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug