Minutes from the Technical Board, 2008-07-15

[Mackenzie Morgan]

On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 06:43 +0800, Onno Benschop wrote:
> On 20/08/08 05:39, Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Andrew Sayers
> > <andrew-ubuntu-devel at pileofstuff.org> wrote:
> >   
> >> I think there's an elephant in this room - why are we running fsck at all?
> >>
> >> b) If it's to check for dying hardware[1], it can be disabled for all
> >> but the oldest hard drives[2], and even then is better replaced with a
> >> badblocks check run while booting continues
> >>     
> >
> > Define "oldest," please.  I actually think SMART (and a GUI to handle
> > it, if one doesn't exist) is rather important.  Bad Blocks may not
> > tell you much nowadays, but SMART can tell you when sectors have been
> > reallocated, hinting at a dying drive.  The disk I replaced in January
> > after SMART flagged it was 18 months old.
> >
> >   
> If you recall the google research about hard drive failures you will
> have remembered that SMART is no indication of impending failure.

I do recall it.  They said it won't *always* fail after SMART flags it
(and that SMART won't *always* catch it), but that it often would, so if
SMART says it's going to fail, and you want to be better safe than
sorry, you replace it.

-- 
Mackenzie Morgan
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com
apt-get moo
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