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

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

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

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