A faulty Caviar Blue hard drive?
- by Glister
We have a small "homemade" server running fully updated Debian Wheezy (amd64). One hard drive installed: WDC WD6400AAKS. The motherboard is ASUS M4N68T V2.
The usual load:
CPU: an average of 20%
Each week about 50GB of additional space is occupied. About 47GB of uploaded files and 3GB of MySQL data.
I'm afraid that the hard drive may be about to fail. I saw Pre-fail on few places when I ran:
root@SERVER:/tmp# smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.2.0-4-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital Caviar Blue Serial ATA
Device Model: WDC WD6400AAKS-XXXXXXX
Serial Number: WD-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee XXXXXXXXXXXXX
Firmware Version: 01.03B01
User Capacity: 640,135,028,736 bytes [640 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
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: Mon Oct 28 18:55:27 2013 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: (0x85) Offline data collection activity
was aborted by an interrupting command from host.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 247) Self-test routine in progress...
70% of test remaining.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: (11580) 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: ( 136) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes.
SCT capabilities: (0x303f) SCT Status supported.
SCT Error Recovery Control 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 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 157 146 021 Pre-fail Always - 5108
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2968
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 051 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 079 079 000 Old_age Always - 15445
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 051 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 051 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2950
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 426
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 2968
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 111 095 000 Old_age Always - 36
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 160 000 Old_age Always - 21716
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 Short offline Completed without error 00% 15444 -
Error SMART Read Selective Self-Test Log failed: scsi error aborted command
Smartctl: SMART Selective Self Test Log Read Failed
root@SERVER:/tmp#
In one tutorial I read that the pre-fail is a an indication of coming failure, in another tutorial I read that it is not true. Can you guys help me decode the output of smartctl?
It would be also nice to share suggestions what should I do if I want to ensure data integrity (about 50GB of new data each week, up to 2TB for the whole period I'm interested in). Maybe I will go with 2x2TB Caviar Black in RAID4?
