On 15 March 2017 at 14:37, Bob Goodwin <bobgoodwin@fastmail.us> wrote:

I just salvaged the hard drive from an abandoned DirectTV box that "smoked." Note: With their approval ...

If the DTV box was heavily used it might be considered a high I/O application, but typical few hours a day use shouldn't be hard on the drive.

I'm just trying to determine how much confidence I can have in it. It was interesting to see that it was formatted Linux XFS initially. I reworked it with gparted and ext4 to test it. Presently it is in a USB adapter connected to a USB2 port on this computer. It appears to have been running for 2.6+ years, I have a number of drives with at least that much time on them and they are still going.

Running linux with heavy I/O (such as remote sensing, video, or numerical modelling) it is rare these days to have drives fail until the warranty has expired, but also rare for them to last much beyond the warranty period. With light I/O drives can last much longer that the warranty. I try to replace drives on high I/O boxes when they reach end of warranty. The most recent drive failures I have encountered involved very full disks and user complaining about slowdowns. In each case, smartctl showed errors, and for the few that were still under warranty the smartctl results were enough to get the authorization to return a drive for warranty replacement.

Any thoughts on making sense of smrtctl are appreciated.

Thanks,

Bob

smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [x86_64-linux-4.9.13-201.fc25.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Seagate Pipeline HD 5900.2
Device Model: ST3500312CS
Serial Number: 5VV9WJQQ
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 0490e4346
Firmware Version: SC13
User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate: 5900 rpm
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4
SATA Version is: SATA 2.6, 3.0 Gb/s (current: 1.5 Gb/s)
Local Time is: Wed Mar 15 13:01:12 2017 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 074 074 000 Old_age Always - 23096
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 85

Try to find the warranty period. I don't trust drives past the warranty period. but

use them for non-critical roles if I think they were not used for high I/O

workloads.

We need to see the full report, but the error reports are pretty easy to spot.

see: https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Analyzing_a_Faulty_Hard_Disk_using_Smartctl#Displaying_the_Test_Results

George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia