Theodore Tso wrote:
The real question though is whether the disk continues to work OK from
this point forward, or whether it is a prelude to an ever-increasing
number of bad blocks. If it is the latter, and S.M.A.R.T. still didn't
give any warning, then it would certainly be an indictment of that
particular manufacturer's S.M.A.R.T. implementation.
I have a practical suggestion. Most recent disk drives have a new type of
self-test option called 'selective self-tests'. This allows you to run a
self-test on up to five user-defined ranges of LBAs. For example, if you
suspect that LBA=12345678 is failing, then instead of having to wait an
hour or two for the entire disk surface to be scanned, you can tell the
disk to scan (say) the range LBA_1=12345000 to LBA_2=12345999 five times
in a row, which takes only a few seconds. By repeating this process many
times you can scan a trouble area on the disk a few thousands of times in
an hour.
For a couple of years, smartmontools smartctl has had the functionality to
invoke these selective self-tests if the disk supports them. But (until
just last week) it was awkward: it required a kernel built with TASKFILE
support enabled, and only worked with (some of the) ide drivers. This has
changed. Thanks to hard work by Doug Gilbert and Jeff Garzik to built a
SAT (SCSI to ATA Translation) layer in libata and to put a SAT interface
into smartmontools, anyone can easily access this functionality with any
SATA disk that supports selective self-test via libata.
Note: no smartmontools release incorporates this yet. You have to build
from CVS. Here are the instructions (4 lines):
cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/smartmontools login (when prompted for a password, just press Enter)
cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/smartmontools co sm5
cd sm5
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make
Here is an example of running a selective self-test five times on the
same range of LBAs as above:
[slave0123 ~]# ./smartctl -d sat -t select,12345000-12345999 -t select,12345000-12345999 -t select,12345000-12345999 -t select,12345000-12345999 -t select,12345000-12345999 /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.37 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
=== START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION ===
Sending command: "Execute SMART Selective self-test routine immediately in
off-line mode".
SPAN STARTING_LBA ENDING_LBA
0 12345000 12345999
1 12345000 12345999
2 12345000 12345999
3 12345000 12345999
4 12345000 12345999
Drive command "Execute SMART Selective self-test routine immediately in
off-line mode" successful. Testing has begun.
Wait a few seconds, then see the results of the selective self-testing:
[slave0123 ~]# ./smartctl -d sat -l selective -l selftest /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.37 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Selective offline Completed without error 00% 1473 -
# 2 Selective offline Completed without error 00% 1473 -
# 3 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 1467 -
SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 12345000 12345999 Not_testing
2 12345000 12345999 Not_testing
3 12345000 12345999 Not_testing
4 12345000 12345999 Not_testing
5 12345000 12345999 Not_testing
Justin, I hope that this is of some help to you and others with similar
issues.
Cheers,
Brucce
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