[OT] Smartd: Worth the effort?

[Brian Fahrlander]

    About five years ago I was well-funded and a little spoiled. I never
worked so hard in my life, and even though I was miserably underpaid for
the industry, my expenses were very low, too.

    I bought a massive 80G drive back in the days when 10's and 15's
were just showing up on the seen for mere mortals to buy.  I wanted
something I'd never outgrow, something to store all my music on, and
never have to think twice about it.  And that's exactly what I got.

    All these years later, it's entry has been commented-out in
/etc/fstab, since having it mounted causes serious problems.  It appears
to be completely locking up the system to the point where a 20-30s
power-off is needed (unless I'm getting two problems at once; we'll
see.)

    The media is degrading now, problems abound, and a pair of 40G'ers
(only $40 each, while I paid over $300 for the 80) to replace it,
since...and this is sad...I never got the drive more than 50% full. 
Isn't that sad?

    And for the last 2-3 years or so, I've been running smartd on it.
Nothing but the lockups and the need for fsck ever gave me any warning.
Nothing in the syslog, other than the nightly notifiction that some
obscure byte in smartd had changed.  Shouldn't I have had _some_
notification?  Isn't this what smartd was designed to identify?

    Just thinking out loud...as I run "chkconfig smartd off"...
-- 
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Brian Fahrländer                  Christian, Conservative, and Technomad
Evansville, IN                                 http://www.fahrlander.net
ICQ 5119262
AIM: WheelDweller
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