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�The Storage Revolt of 2003�
2003-11-19, 00:30:00
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Last year we had the firmware revolt; this year, we appear to be having the storage revolt.


Yesterday we had about eight inches of rain and nineteen tornadoes around Houston, all at once. Of course, this was accompanied by lightning, power outages, etc. During the day, one particularly bad storm cell knocked out our power, and when it came back and my development web server came back up, all the content came back 403 Forbidden. Further investigation showed that I lost one of the filesystems of my server.

Ouch!

Fortunately, I fixed it, and I even did a write up on it so that others wouldn't have to suffer a similar fate.

After my (normally eighteen minute) commute took me about two hours (have I mentioned that Houston floods terribly?), I got home and started checking other things out. During the checking, I heard this... noise. The best way I could describe it was taking a marble and bouncing it off a glass surface repeatedly. It smacked of a head crash, and I turned ice cold inside because of all the data I have aggregated on my hard disks and have yet to burn to CD-Rs.

What to do? Everything seems to be running fine. Well, I run relatively current Western Digital drives... maybe they are S.M.A.R.T.-enabled? Maybe this can confirm or deny that my drives are dying?


After much searching, I end up with a demo of Active SMART software from Ariolic Software. I installed it, and everything tests out within normal parameters, except that I keep getting alerts on my seek error rate going from 200 even to 100 even, and my drive spin-up times varying every time I restart the computer, albeit neither is within failure parameters. I am starting to wonder about both of my drives now (specifically, the WD800JB 80 gigabyte with the extended cache and WD400BB 40 gigabyte).

A search on this issue over at Google Groups yields a fair number of results - I am not the only one; loosen the search up some and you find a lot more. That means that a lot of drives from Western Digital that are 30 gigabytes and up are crap, or it's a firmware issue and totally normal responses. Since I am having good luck with Western Digital drives at work and at home (knock on wood), I'm thinking that it's normal.

What's more, it's predicting that my drive will fail tomorrow - I take this to mean that if my stats are going from 200 to 100, and the threshold is 51, then sure, it'll fail tomorrow on a linear curve. However, it doesn't mention that it went back up to 200 not too long after that. (Apparently, more/higher is better.)

Going straight to the source, I downloaded Western Digital's Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for Windows and ran them on both of my drives. Both passed with flying colors.


Thus, I call complete and utter bullshit on Active SMART and it's alarmist warnings. Yes, this is what the S.M.A.R.T. circuitry returns. Yes, they are just reporting what is default settings. But the problem is that when they interpret things and you go by what their website says about failures, then their predictions are nonsense.

I tell you what - I will take it all back if I come home and one or both of my drives are dead tomorrow. Until then, I suggest if you want to know what's up with your hard disk, contact your manufacturer or visit their website for support and diagnostic tools. Don't trust some third party's shareware claptrap. A lesson learned.

Another lesson learned? Save myself all this heartache and buy an uninterruptable power supply. I bought one this afternoon, the CyberPower CPS1250AVR, so it should be on its way sooner or later. Hopefully this will stop some of my worrying about dead computers.



2013-03-01

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2005-04-11

AtoZed Software's Indy installer *sucks*

2005-01-10

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2004-10-25

One of the (many) joys of having your own server


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