[mdlug] New hard drive
Drew
drew4096 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 9 00:26:42 EST 2009
Got it at Microcenter at a discount as it was missing the box,
instructions, and CD; but the plastic wrapper
was still sealed. Still I figured it behooved me to examine it
anyway. Knowing that modern hard drives play
hide-the-sausage with bad sectors and report a perfect disk as long
as possible, I tried Spinrite 6.0, which
refused to work with the disk, blaming my BIOS.
So I found a rescue image with smartctl on it, specifically RIPLinux,
actually not a bad distro. (It worked with
my wireless card out-of-the-box and had Firefox 3.5 among other
things - too bad it had no printer support
else I'd consider it as the new main OS. I might anyway.)
After running a short and a long test (smartctl --test=short|long...)
and waiting the specified amount of time
for the tests to complete, I then ran smartctl --all and got the following:
smartctl 5.39 2008-12-26 22:12 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-8 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital Caviar Blue EIDE family
Device Model: WDC WD3200AAJB-22WGA0
Serial Number: WD-WCARW4134886
Firmware Version: 00.02C01
User Capacity: 320,072,933,376 bytes
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Thu Jan 8 02:40:54 2009 UTC
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x80) Offline data collection activity
was never started.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test
routine completed
without error or no self-test has ever
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: (8400) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection
on/off support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 100) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes.
SCT capabilities: (0x203f) SCT Status supported.
SCT Feature Control supported.
SCT Data Table supported.
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH
TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1
Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always
- 0
3
Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 160 160 021 Pre-fail Always
- 4983
4
Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 9
5
Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always
- 0
7
Seek_Error_Rate 0x000e 200 200 051 Old_age Always
- 0
9
Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 5
10
Spin_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 253 051 Old_age Always
- 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count
0x0012 100 253 051 Old_age Always - 0
12
Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 8
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count
0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 6
193
Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always
- 9
194
Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 115 108 000 Old_age Always
- 32
196 Reallocated_Event_Count
0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197
Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 200 200 000 Old_age Always
- 0
198
Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 253 000 Old_age Offline
- 0
199
UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 193 000 Old_age Always
- 24
200
Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 051 Old_age Offline
- 0
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining
LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 4 -
# 2 Short offline Completed without error 00% 2 -
SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.
It looks good as far as I could see. But I'd like expert comment on
it. Also I've been told that Google has
found zero correlation between smartctl results and disk life. Should
I be doing something else to get
the hard drive to tell the truth about its bad sector count?
Assuming all is well: What distros would serve me best?
My 160G has Fedora Core 4, plus a kanotix boot CD copied to a hard
disk partition. I might put multiple
distros on the new drive. Wanted in as few distros as possible:
* Support for ACX100 chipset wireless card
* Support for Samsung ML1710 printer
* Screen resolution 1280x1024 or better on OptiQuest monitor
* Virtual machine software
* Latest Firefox, other browsers, video and sound players, plus all codecs
* Latest non-Beta Open Office
* Support for BT848 Video Capture card (less important)
Recommendations?
----
- Drew.
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