Hard disk woes
Michael Abbott
michael at araneidae.co.uk
Mon Sep 5 13:39:34 PDT 2005
On Mon, 5 Sep 2005, David Kelly wrote:
>>> I had a very similar problem a while back. After replacing the drive in
>>> question, then replacing the motherboard, I discovered it was a power
>>> issue. The power supply was freaking out at medium to high loads, which
>>> was causing the device to continually reset.
>>
> On Sep 5, 2005, at 1:56 PM, Michael Abbott wrote:
>> Well, I hope that's not it. I'm encouraged to think not:
> Yeah But... Power supplies wear out. Particularly the capacitors.
>
> I have seen every single component replaced in denial that the problem could
> be related to the power supply. Then the PS was finally replaced because it
> was the only thing which had not. And the problem was the PS all along.
Well, I do have another reason for thinking that it's nothing to do with
the power supply: a bit of history I didn't mention (because it's long
and not particularly interesting).
When I first installed this machine (a bit over three years ago) I used
the offending disk together with another disk of the same model. I first
used the motherboard hardware RAID (using striping for speed, more fool
me) on the motherboard and installed FreeBSD. It broke, really quite
quickly (within a week or so).
I blamed the RAID controller and tried again, this time using vinum. The
system survived quite a bit longer (can't remember how long, a month or so
maybe), but suddenly failed quite horribly: I lost all data. I retired
the two disks and started again, and the resulting system has run sweetly
for three years.
Recently I brought the two disks out of retirement, and one of them seems
most unhappy (as described). I'm strongly persuaded (convinced, even)
that that one disk is dodgy. I think I'm going to have to bin it, unless
somebody can come up with a way to reliably molycoddle it.
I still think the question: "why does FreeBSD hang?" is interesting.
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list