Long I/O pauses on same mass storage

[A. Wright]

On Wed, 12 May 2010, Mike Tancsa wrote:

> At 09:46 AM 5/12/2010, A. Wright wrote:
>> Does anyone have any thoughts on how to conclusively
>> prove that the drive is at fault?  I have not seen any
>> errors logged to dmesg.
>
> Start with smartmontools to ask your disk if it has logged any errors
> and check once a day or so to see if sectors are being remapped.

Thanks for the tip.

So I ran the "short" test, and am now running the "long" test.  After
the short test, I have been examining the output (using smartctl -a),
and there seem to be no errors reports.

I just noticed, however, the following two interesting lines that
/var/log/messages seems to have acquired:
 	May 12 15:44:00 qemg kernel: ad8: FAILURE - SMART status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=4<ABORTED>
 	May 12 16:05:27 qemg kernel: swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 294, size: 8192

The first dates from the point at which I turned on SMART data logging.
The second one, however looks more interesting to me -- am I correct
in thinking that there is no good reason why the "swap_pager" error
would appear, aside from some sort of hardware related failure?

Thanks,
Andrew.