Is my Harddrive failing?

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sat, 2009-10-31 at 11:39 +0000, Alan Cox wrote: 
> > Oct 31 08:05:04 merk kernel:         res 41/40:00:af:3a:d7/30:00:1e:00:00/00 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
> > Oct 31 08:05:04 merk kernel: ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
> > Oct 31 08:05:04 merk kernel: ata1.00: error: { UNC }
> 
> That is the drive reporting a bad block yes. Whether it is a one off
> failure or the start of a pattern of fails ending in doom is
> unfortunately rather harder to tell.

It used to be fairly common for new disks to have a few bad blocks--back
in the dark days of early PCs when disk drive capacities were measured
in tens or low hundreds of megabytes.  Then things seemed to improve as
manufacturing techniques improved.  When disk capacities were measured
in tens or low hundreds of gigabytes, I don't recall ever encountering a
new drive with bad blocks.  Now that capacities have reached the
terabyte range, it seems that a few bad blocks on new drives are once
again less rare.

It would be nice if the monitor software could record the state of a
drive and issue reports when the number of bad blocks increases from the
starting state, rather than insisting that every bad block is a sign of
imminent failure.  The persistent false alarm provokes the user to
ignore the monitor or turn it off entirely, thus risking missing a
warning of an imminent real failure.

> 
> Alan
> 
> 
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs