I woke up to this today. Complicating the matter: this server is destined to be transported tomorrow morning. This is FreeBSD 8.2 I guess the good news is: But wait, is that gpt/disk04-live really /dev/ada5? Yes. Yes it is: After a question from Peter Wemm on Twitter, I added: Full smartctl output follows:
Oh oh, a sector problem Read More »
As you’ll no doubt know, I’ve recently bought two new computer, and built them up. I’ve settled on the Toshiba 3TB DT01ACA300 HDD as my drive of choice for these systems. I ran a few tests recently and found some interesting results. I haven’t published them here yet. My main test is a database load. I just take an 8GB text file and create a PostgreSQL database from it. The file in question
same HDD, different server, +50% performance hit Read More »
While on a recent trip, logcheck started telling me about a problem: Mar 19 07:26:55 bast smartd[1573]: Device: /dev/ad0, Failed SMART usage Attribute: 9 Power_On_Hours. Looking at the full output: On line 59, you’ll see that this drive has been in use for 7.4 years. Other than that, it seems to be OK. This link seems to indicate there is nothing to worry about. This system dates from at least October 2005. It
This harddrive is getting on in life Read More »
About a week ago, I was doing some HDD benchmark tests and I accidentally specified the boot drive as the source for a test. Oops. Everything was OK. Until I rebooted. It would not boot. I figured I knew what happend. I’d munged my boot code. And I knew how to fix it. However, I didn’t realize that I’d also deleted the boot partition. I asked on the FreeBSD dev IRC channel. db
Oops, I deleted my boot partition Read More »
I’ve been testing drives lately. Mostly hard disks, but also one solid state drive. The test itself is automated, but manually started. That’s because it requires a reboot between each run. That restricts testing time to certain hours of the day. I’d like to automate this. Today I had what may be a clever solution: Use the @reboot feature of crontab(5) to start a script after reboot In that script, cd to a
Automating that regression testing Read More »
I noticed today that the serial number for Toshiba drives, as retrieved by smartctl(8) is not the whole serial number. I am not sure why. I discovered this when I went to check the warranty information for a drive. The drive is fine; I just wanted to check. Using smartctl, I got this: Right there, on line 7, you can see the serial number. Count it. It’s 9 characters. Now visit the Toshiba
smartctl: Toshiba HDD serial numbers are only 9 characters Read More »
The LSI 9211-8i 6Gb/s SATA +SAS HBA, which I recently obtained, is running the stock IR (Integrated RAID) firmware. In order to use the disks in strictly passthrough mode and avoid having any metadata written to them by the card, the card needs to be changed over to IT (Initiator Target) firmware. I had heard about this before. And I’ve read it about it on the From 32 to 2 ports: Ideal SATA/SAS
Flashing IT firmware for LSI 9211-8i on FreeBSD Read More »
I was looking around for warranty checking pages. I found these for my HDD: Western Digital Toshiba Seagate and Maxtor
HDD warranty checks Read More »
I think I’m now at the point where I have all the hardware assembled and it’s ready for testing. Now I’m trying to determine what set of fio tests to run. If you know of a set of standard tests, or just have some of your own, please let me know in the comments. The hardware The disks I have assembled are all available via the LSI 9211-8i. The basic hardware specs are:
The hardware is ready. What tests to run? Read More »
Do you have Seagate ST2000DM001? This 2TB drives seems OK at straight dd output, but seems absolutely terrible at random output. If you have one, and do not mind this destructive test (IT WILL DESTROY ANY DATA ON THAT DRIVE), please let me know the results. The reason I ask is the very slow results we’re getting from a tool designed to test the throughput of an HDD based on writing data at
Do you have a Seagate ST2000DM001? Read More »