Exercising ATA disks in hopes of revealing errors

[Doug Poland]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 01:06:53PM -0400, Bill Moran wrote:
> In response to "Doug Poland" <doug at polands.org>:
> 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I've just come into possesion of a bunch of 80GB ATA drives.  I'd
> > like to quickly and efficiently test each drive to see if it's free
> > of errors and suitable for deployment in non-critical workstations.
> > 
> 
> Check with the vendors, though.  Many drive manufacturers have utilities
> you can download specifically to check their drives.
> 
Thanks, this seems like the way to go.  I have a follow-up question if
that's OK...

I just used the "Drive Fitness Test" for IBM ATA drives on a particular
disk and it finished without detecting errors.  However, I see messages
like this:

Apr 16 22:51:44 seth kernel: ad3: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=1904935
Apr 16 22:52:02 seth kernel: ad3: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=8029031
Apr 16 23:35:30 seth kernel: ad3: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=2269287
Apr 16 23:37:22 seth kernel: ad3: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=3612007
Apr 16 23:48:17 seth kernel: ad3: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=1932123
Apr 17 21:12:25 seth kernel: ad3: FAILURE - SMART status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=4<ABORTED> LBA=12734209
Apr 17 21:12:25 seth kernel: ad3: FAILURE - SMART status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=4<ABORTED> LBA=12734214

in /var/log/messages.

Do the kernel messages indicate a potential problem with this drive?
Whom should I believe, FreeBSD or the disk diagnostics tool?


-- 
Regards,
Doug