Confirmed premature hard disk failure

[Paulo Cavalcanti]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 2:48 AM, Chuck Anderson <cra at wpi.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 07:21:26PM -0600, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> >   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 197 197 140 Pre-fail Always - 19
> > 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 192 190 000 Old_age Always - 86
>
> > off until now. 6 and 7 are from when I first noticed
> > Current_Pending_Sector was nonzero, maybe a month or two ago. 8 is from
> > my post in July. 9 and 10 are from when the drive was new.
>
> > 1) The SMART health status is PASSED. Just like every other failed drive
> > I've had...
>
> Don't look at that alone.
>
> > 2) None of the attributes are failed.
>
> I consider > 0 on Current_Pending_Sector or Reallocated_Sector_Ct to
> be failing.
>
> > 3) By the time the self tests start failing, it is too late, you are
> > already losing data.
>
> If Current_Pending_Sector or Reallocated_Sector_Ct increases > 0,
> replace the drive immediately.
>
> > We can not trust the drive to assess itself properly. If we ever get a
> > SMART desktop alert thing going, we MUST look directly at the
> > attributes, and come to our own conclusion.
>
> Yes, we should consider any drive to be failed if it gets any pending
> or reallocated sectors.
>
> > Any questions before I RMA the drive?
>
> Why did you wait until you had many pending/reallocated sectors before
> RMAing it instead of RMAing it as soon as you had 1 bad sector?
>
>
I have a friend in the same situation. His drive is failing the same way as
yours,
and the boot is taking too long. However, he always used Ubuntu.

When I warned him, 6 month ago, about the problem, it was too late. He
already had
a high score for the load cycle.

What I do not understand is why the major distributions do not change the
default power save
scheme for laptop disks. It is a so simple solution, and I do not see any
drawback.
Because of the battery life? Most people use their laptops on AC power
almost all the time.

Even having all partitions backed up with partimage, it is a pain on the
neck replacing
a laptop disk.


-- 
Paulo Roma Cavalcanti
LCG - UFRJ
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