[linux-lvm] Strange hard drive behaviour

[vegh at omega.telia.net]

I dont think it is hardware failure. These are brand new servers, and I 
got the same behaviour on all of them I installed. It is not a clicking 
noise, rather a very fast "crackling" noise. We are using RAID1, so the 
different speeds of the drives can be a problem. On the same machine I 
tried to create a file system and copy data with an without LVM. I got the 
noise only when I use LVM. I suspect stripping over the same disk could 
casue something like this, but I have one PV per physical disk, and dont 
specify the -i and -I option when I do lvcreate. I will do some further 
tests.

Thanks for your time,
Norbert Vegh

> That nasty click is an IDE drive resetting itself.  Failure may be
> moments away.  In the hardware RAID you described, it may be a bit
> harder to isolate which drive is dying ... you may actually have to
> get your head next to each one to find it.
> 
> The problem then is that you need to evacuate that PV (which may be the
> whole array from your description of the setup) and replace the faulty
> drive.  You may be able to take less drastic action, depending upon the
> capabilities of your RAID card.
> 
> If you are mirroring, you can also get this if one of the drives in the
> mirror is slower than the other (also happens if you are striping, but
> you said that you weren't).
> 
> While drives can live for months this way, they drag your system
> performance to the ground and eventually fail anyway.  Get out
> while you can still save your data!
> 
> 
> Michael Kellen
>