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.


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