On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 05:57:33AM -0500, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> Is there a way for me to test these 4 questionable drives under a live CD to
> see if any of them are reliable enough to use in my nfs server?
Use 'badblocks' for surface testing and 'smartmontools' for the rest
of the circuitry.
For badblocks, I'm using the following incantation:
badblocks -s -v -c 128 -b 4096 -w
Depending on the speed and capacity of the drives, it could take a
whole day.
With smartmontools, you use the 'smartctl' program to look at the
values of the SMART counters, which include certain classes of errors.
You use:
smartctl -a /dev/[hs]d[abcd]
depending of the type and physical position of your drive in the
system.
If the 'SMART Error Log' section contains the 'No Errors Logged', then
you are half-way out of the woods. To make sure, start a exhaustive
self-test with:
smartctl -t long /dev/[hs]d[abcd]
The program should tell you how long the test will take and when to
come back and run the 'smartctl -a' to get the results.
BTW: you should run 'badblocks' before 'smartctl', to give the whole
disk surface a good scrub. The error counters reflect only errors
that occurred while attempting to operate on a sector. If the sector
is corrupted but nobody asks for it... it won't be counted.
Good luck,
florin
--
Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition.
http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/fact/163
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