Disk

[JD]

On 11/24/2012 04:13 AM, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Nov 2012 01:34:59 -0700
> JD <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> which info retrieved by sdparam or hdparam would indicate
>> that the drive is reaching it's EOL.
> You want the smart health test man smartctl. I suspect --health is what
> you are looking for ?
>
Interesting!
Running
# smartctl -H /dev/sdc
smartctl 5.43 2012-06-30 r3573 [i686-linux-3.6.6-1.fc16.i686] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-12 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

Yet, running smartctl -x  shows a few pre-failure
values. To wit:

   1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     POSR--   117   099   006    - 131606848


   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   PO--CK   100   100   036    -    3
   7 Seek_Error_Rate         POSR--   083   060   030    - 209089036

  10 Spin_Retry_Count        PO--C-   100   100   097    -    0

I am having serious problems with disk writes because the disks
are going to standby, which the OS (F16) is not handling it correctly
and reports write failures, especially during shutdown where it is
unable to write the journal to the disk and reports journal commit
failures:
messages:Nov 20 20:51:25 localhost kernel: [46916.385586] journal commit 
I/O error
messages:Nov 20 20:51:25 localhost kernel: [46916.385998] journal commit 
I/O error
messages:Nov 20 21:14:03 localhost kernel: [48274.947764] journal commit 
I/O error
messages-20121118:Nov 16 23:42:05 localhost kernel: [ 4543.391840] 
journal commit I/O error

Yet, this does not happen if I shutdown after doing
ls -R /<mount point> on the sleeping drives, which wakes them up
and then I shutdown and no more write journal errors.

So, I have been looking for ways to prevent the drives from going to sleep.
Only thing I have found was the option -s in the manpage for hdparm, but it
has the "VERY DANGEROUS" phrase tacked to it, but without explanation as to
the consequences of the danger.

But, I to a chance. I first woke up the drive by writing a small junk file
to a dir in one of it's mounted partitions, then ran

# hdparm -C /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
  drive state is:  active/idle
# hdparm -s 0 /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
  spin-up: setting power-up in standby to 0 (off)
  HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(powerup_in_standby) failed: Input/output error

Tried it a few times, and still getting io error,
but the rest of normal operation are OK, as long as the disk
is not in standby when a write command is issued.