[wellylug] Testing hard disks

[Volker Kuhlmann]

> One more thought: if the errors appear when reading from the disk but
> disappear once you've written to the disk and read back again, then I
> suspect the disk is actually doing "sector relocation" on you -- ie,
> instead of using the sectors it has found "bad", it's using another set
> of sectors in its relocation area for them.

Yes, I think that's right.

For the record, I remembered SMART, man smartctl, the disk-integrated
health monitoring. Even comes with a daemon for periodic monitoring to
syslog (I should set that up). Poking around with it yeilds some
interesting information (incl that a different Western Digital 4GB disk
doesn't even support error logging, blerrrg to WD). After running the
disk's built-in selftest (this is a Maxtor) I am now going to get a new
disk.

I would recommend people get familiar with smartctl.

Volker

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