Strange HDD behavior?

[Shizzle Cash]

On 12/10/08 7:51 AM, Brian McKee wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 3:07 AM, Amichai Rotman<amichai at iglu.org.il>  wrote:
>    
>> Now all is OK, but I noticed my Kubuntu 8.04.1 box's HDD led is blinking
>> franticly for ours.
>>      
>
> Is that for hours?
>
>    
>> I ran the top command and I see 'kjournald' is high on the list, often at
>> the top of it...
>>      
>
> kjournald is related to the journal for ext3.   What do you see in
> /var/log/messages or syslog?
>
>
> To do a quick hard drive health check you could also install
> smartmontools and run sudo smartctl -AH /dev/sda
> Note that SMART isn't perfect - in my experience a drive marked bad is
> going to die, but a drive that it says is ok could still have issues.
>
> Brian
>
>    
I can definitely vouch for the last statement about a SMART tool stating 
a drive is OK, but in reality it is not.  As an anecdote, I recently had 
to RMA one of my hard drives.  It is a Western Digital, only ~ 2 years 
old that wound up exhibiting the "click of death".  It had momentarily 
performed the click during an earlier reboot, but I was able to get the 
drive up.  After that episode, I downloaded WD's hard drive check tool 
and checked the SMART status and also performed the "quick" test (which 
checks for everything except for bad sectors).  The utility gave the 
drive a clean bill of health.  I backed up the data anyhow, and on the 
next reboot, the drive was dead for good.

So, yes, if a SMART utility deems a drive is bad, it almost certainly 
is.  But, if it says a drive is OK, it might not actually be OK.  It 
should only be one of many tools in your trouble-shooting arsenal.