How long does it take for a dead HD to die?

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oneplane

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Jul 23, 2021
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I accept that the drive is as untrustworthy as it can possibly be and still function and would never trust it. But still, the original question stands. I guess only time will tell.
It is indeed the only result here. What we do know is that there are a lot of reallocated sectors and that is usually an indication that the drive is going bad, but without a constantly growing amount or remaps it's so hard to tell how long it would last, or if it re-allocated on a failed read or a failed write (a failed read would be the worst, that's just dataloss in most cases).
 
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Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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becaus hd sntinel is rubbish (where you got the error about bad drive).
I can believe this but as far as GUI's go, what's a good alternative? I don't need 20 pages of details to scroll thru or a bunch of garbage that is irreverent and/or is unintelligible. Most programs can't see SAS drives or drives connect to a HBA or RAID controller.
 

ari2asem

Active Member
Dec 26, 2018
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I can believe this but as far as GUI's go, what's a good alternative? I don't need 20 pages of details to scroll thru or a bunch of garbage that is irreverent and/or is unintelligible. Most programs can't see SAS drives or drives connect to a HBA or RAID controller.
did you try gsmartcontrol with the latest build of smartmontools installed ?
 

sko

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Jun 11, 2021
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I can believe this but as far as GUI's go, what's a good alternative? I don't need 20 pages of details to scroll thru or a bunch of garbage that is irreverent and/or is unintelligible. Most programs can't see SAS drives or drives connect to a HBA or RAID controller.
smartctl can even poll SAS/SATA drives on SAS-expanders and nvme drives and you can choose what part of SMART-data you want to see - or just pipe its output to grep or awk to just output *exactly* what you want.
I don't get the fuss about needing GUIs for everything, if all one wants/needs is some data which is best represented in plaintext anyways.
 
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Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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smartctl can even poll SAS/SATA drives on SAS-expanders and nvme drives and you can choose what part of SMART-data you want to see - or just pipe its output to grep or awk to just output *exactly* what you want.
I don't get the fuss about needing GUIs for everything, if all one wants/needs is some data which is best represented in plaintext anyways.
Works great if you use it enough to memorize the syntax but sucks royally if you don't.
 

sko

Active Member
Jun 11, 2021
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Works great if you use it enough to memorize the syntax but sucks royally if you don't.
that's why there is an '-h' switch and a manpage... Most manpages (e.g. the one for smartctl) have an "EXAMPLES" section towards the end, where usually the most common use cases are shown. 90% of the time you will find what you want to know within this short section, so no need to read the whole manpage (or just search in it via '/<keyword>')
and tbh - it can't take that long to memorize '-iA' to get the disk (i)nfo and SMART (A)ttributes.
 

UhClem

just another Bozo on the bus
Jun 26, 2012
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Works great if you use it enough to memorize the syntax but sucks royally if you don't.
Good point ...
Counterpoint: Shell alias (or just one-liner scripts)

Use case for shell alias: Every once in a while, I'm doing some disk/filesystem performance testing, and it is necessary/prudent to flush-and-clear the OS system buffers, to get a known and consistent base condition. But I can never remember the exact command(s) to do that.

Solution:
Code:
alias lobotomy='sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' # flush/clear buffers
alias fflobotomy='sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' # " " also metadata
Bonus: you choose the name ;)
======
"Life is such monotony,
Without a good lobotomy." --Roy Harper ; "Committed"
 
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StanLee

Member
Apr 10, 2022
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"How long does it take for a dead HD to die?"

This is obviously either a Zen koan or a 300-level quantum physics exam question. Or maybe it's both in a superimposed eigenstate.
 

Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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Haven't fired up my dying HD server in a while. Just did. This wicked HD is now showing 100% health and more than 1000 days remaining life in HD Sentinel. When I first fired the server up it wouldn't show up in on the network so I pulled it out of the rack so I could hook a monitor up to it. It wasn't posting. I cut power, pulled out all the drives and tried again. She started normally with no hints in the Windows logs as to what happened. I then started inserting the drives one by one. When I got to this drive I was half way expecting the server to croak when I inserted it but it didn't. I had HD Sentinel open and waited for the drive to show up. When it did it showed 100% health. I have no idea what's going on here. :confused:
 

Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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hd sentinel is crap.
use smartmontools
Yea, I'm thinking it's been the problem all along. I have another HD whose health improved for no reason. Going from 0% health to 100% is pretty bizarre.