Curiosity question about hdd

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lightman47
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Location: Central New York, USA

Curiosity question about hdd

Post by lightman47 » 2021/06/12 17:01:35

I have a 2TB HDD that I had installed on a machine as dual-boot. Windows 10 soon got all wonky despite RHEL 8 ran beautifully. I ran a read only disk test program and about 1/2 hour in it began accumulating read errors - a lot of them. I cancelled the test and swapped the drive for (2) 1TB drives to get the machine built & running properly.

Incidentally, smartdrive reported this Seagate as old age/pre-fail and a run time of 1 month 29 days, but all results were OK. (Old age boggles my mind, but that's a digression).

I took that problematic drive, plugged in into another RHEL box and ran "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M status=progress;sync" and. as expected, it took several hours to complete. And THAT it did - without error!

Is it possible that the 'dd' zeroing of the drive correctly marked bad sectors as bad - so the good areas are left? I'll probably shelve the drive for use in another non-critical machine build and was wondering in advance how much trouble I ought expect.

Thank you.

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TrevorH
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Re: Curiosity question about hdd

Post by TrevorH » 2021/06/12 17:39:09

Is it possible that the 'dd' zeroing of the drive correctly marked bad sectors as bad - so the good areas are left? I'll probably shelve the drive for use in another non-critical machine build and was wondering in advance how much trouble I ought expect.
Drives come out of the factory with a number of spare sectors that are reserved for replacing ones that go bad. When they get a read error on a bad sector they mark the sector as bad (check the smartctl -a output for Current_Pending_Sector, Offline_Uncorrectable and Reallocated_Event_Count). A sector that's marked as "Pending" will get replaced with one from the spare area next time it is written to. So, yes, it may appear that it has fixed the problem but you should keep an eye on it and see if other sectors get marked as pending/uncorrectable - perhaps kick off a dd from the drive to /dev/null and let it run and see if anything new appears.

And the description of the field Power_On_Hours is always "Old_age/Always", it doesn't change. What's important there is the value showing how many hours it's been powered on.

If the drive is under warranty then I'd be tempted to try to exchange it now rather than wait.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
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tunk
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Re: Curiosity question about hdd

Post by tunk » 2021/06/12 17:41:16

You could also try this: badblocks -svw /dev/sdX
Could possibly be a bad cable or connectors.

Edit: What does smartctl -a /dev/sdX show about
Reallocated_Sector_Ct?

lightman47
Posts: 1521
Joined: 2014/05/21 20:16:00
Location: Central New York, USA

Re: Curiosity question about hdd

Post by lightman47 » 2021/06/13 11:39:23

Edit: What does smartctl -a /dev/sdX show about
Reallocated_Sector_Ct?
Top
I shall plug it back in later and check. Thank you.

EDIT:

Code: Select all

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdc
smartctl 7.1 2020-04-05 r5049 [x86_64-linux-4.18.0-305.3.1.el8_4.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-19, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda Green (AF)
Device Model:     ST2000DL003-9VT166
Serial Number:    5YD7WMKB
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 03ce5f783
Firmware Version: CC32
User Capacity:    2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate:    5900 rpm
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Sun Jun 13 08:02:24 2021 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x82)	Offline data collection activity
					was completed without error.
					Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
Self-test execution status:      (   0)	The previous self-test routine completed
					without error or no self-test has ever 
					been run.
Total time to complete Offline 
data collection: 		(  612) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: 			 (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
					Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
					Suspend Offline collection upon new
					command.
					Offline surface scan supported.
					Self-test supported.
					Conveyance Self-test supported.
					Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities:            (0x0003)	Saves SMART data before entering
					power-saving mode.
					Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability:        (0x01)	Error logging supported.
					General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine 
recommended polling time: 	 (   1) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: 	 ( 336) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: 	 (   2) minutes.
SCT capabilities: 	       (0x30b7)	SCT Status supported.
					SCT Feature Control supported.
					SCT Data Table supported.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   111   099   006    Pre-fail  Always       -       41144184
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   095   092   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       226
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   072   060   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       19083580
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1465
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       120
183 Runtime_Bad_Block       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1
184 End-to-End_Error        0x0032   100   100   099    Old_age   Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
188 Command_Timeout         0x0032   100   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       8590065765
189 High_Fly_Writes         0x003a   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   080   065   045    Old_age   Always       -       20 (Min/Max 20/20)
191 G-Sense_Error_Rate      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       129
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       226
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   020   040   000    Old_age   Always       -       20 (0 15 0 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   015   009   000    Old_age   Always       -       41144184
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       1468 (56 67 0)
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       316945230
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       1471296060

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Extended offline    Aborted by host               90%      1447         -

SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
 SPAN  MIN_LBA  MAX_LBA  CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
    1        0        0  Not_testing
    2        0        0  Not_testing
    3        0        0  Not_testing
    4        0        0  Not_testing
    5        0        0  Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
  After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

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