Re: [gentoo-user] smartctrl drive error @60%

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 26/06/2014 13:20, Dale wrote:
>> Alan McKinnon wrote:
>>> My experiences aren't worth much in this case, what I had to deal with
>>> was data center setups where - the power has never gone off for 6
>>> years - the drives never spin down and just keep on turning year after
>>> year - the servers were the nice big ones Dell makes with awesome
>>> cooling - the data center feels like a fridge and the ambient temp
>>> never varies more than 1 deg - the server power supplies are seriously
>>> high grade, the 5V and 12V out of them are solid and do not fluctuate
>>> at all Add all this up and it's an almost perfect environment for
>>> drives to last a long time. You don't have that, not even close. I
>>> have only 1 little bit of anecdotal data: my nas at home has 4 x 3T WD
>>> Green drives in it, going on almost 2 years now. My kids hammer the
>>> blazes out of that thing, and ZFS scrubs keep it real busy when the
>>> kids don't. And those drives just keep on turning and turning and
>>> turning, I didn't do anything special. I put it down to statistics -
>>> no-one makes bad drives (or cars) these days and I haven't pulled the
>>> unlucky card yet. I dunno, go figure 
>> Well, it does make good points tho.  I keep my room here pretty cool. 
>> It's not as cool as your data center but I have a window A/C and my own
>> heater.  I don't mind it being a little cool in the winter but don't
>> like it warm in the summer either.  The cooler the better. 
>>
>> I also have the Cooler Master HAF-932 case with those really nice large
>> fans.  The hard drives are right in front of the front intake fan.  I
>> have a power supply that is really to big for what I have running.  I
>> can't recall the brand and wattage just that it doesn't pull near as
>> much power as I thought it would.  It pulls less than half what my older
>> and much slower puter pulled.  Also, I rarely shut this thing down.  I
>> did the other night to unplug/re-plug all the cables but other than
>> that, it is usually because I have lost power from the mains. 
>>
>> So, keep them cool, good clean power and leave them running when ya
>> can.  Sounds like a plan.  ;-) 
>
> You got it :-)
>
> hard drives are mechanical objects, not electronic ones, and they fail
> for mechanical reasons. Motors fail, bearings seize, spindle arms wear
> out. Transforming magnetic blobs on the platter into binary bits is very
> reliable, as long as the head is in exactly the place it is supposed to
> be. So the enemies of disks are environmental;
>
> - temperature and humidity changes
> - frequent spin ups and spin downs
> - dust
> - power dips/fluctuations and brown-outs
> - being dropped, knocked and generally ubused
>
> etc, etc, etc
>
> Take care of the environmental factors, and statistics fall in your
> favour making the odds good you'll get the life you expect
>

I think that is one reason I have had some pretty good luck with that. 
I might also add, I have actually only had one computer that failed. 
That includes the ones that folks just gave me which is quite a few. 
Most of them just get to slow to use.  The ones I build, I build them
like a tank.  I put coolers on everything that is even a little warm. 
My CPU cooler on my current rig is pretty large.  Case fans blowing a
lot of air, quiet if possible.  For this drive that I have going out now
to go out, it has to have a issue not related to cooling and such. 
Unless it was somehow handled badly while being shipped to me, its never
been dropped or anything either.  This is a desktop, with wheels since
it is on carpet, and it rarely goes anywhere.  It doesn't get rattled
around like a laptop or something. 

My old rig, AMD 2500+ in a old full tower case still runs good.  I
booted it a month or so ago.  I had a Volcano 11 or 12 on the CPU which
is solid copper.  I replaced the northbridge cooler with a copper cooler
with a fan.  The mosfets close to the CPU, I added coolers to them too. 
It had 5 case fans.  It wasn't quiet but it ran cool.  The mobo temps
were usually just a couple degrees above room temp.  CPU never got over
100F.  Heck, the CPU in my current rig has never seen 110F.  The highest
I have ever seen was 107F and that was when I was compiling and had
power to blink just enough to cut off my A/C for a hour or so.  Maybe I
need a UPS for my A/C too.  :-D 

It seems the best thing WE can do, good power, good cooling, don't drop
it and keep backups. 

I went back through the error logs and found this:

Jun 12 23:30:36 localhost smartd[2688]: Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], 104
Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
Jun 12 23:30:36 localhost smartd[2688]: Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], 104
Offline uncorrectable sectors 

That's the first error I could find.  It went from nothing to that in
one huge jump.  I also found this:

Jun  8 03:10:02 localhost sSMTP[7164]: Unable to locate mail
Jun  8 03:10:02 localhost sSMTP[7164]: Cannot open mail:25
Jun  8 03:10:03 localhost CROND[7145]: (root) MAIL (mailed 57 bytes of
output but got status 0x0001
)

It seems it is trying to mail something.  I need to work on that when I
get the new drive set up.  I already have smtp installed. 

Dale

:-)  :-)