Ominous smartd messages ....

[Ken Moffat]

On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 07:37:50AM -0453, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> On 08/03/16 07:24, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> > On 08/03/16 04:41, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> > > My question is: Are these messages benign, or am I in the market for
> > > more hardware ? *ANY* more questions, please ask. TIA & have a good one.
> > It doesn't look particularly good.  Do you run the smartd selftests at
> > all?  Worth giving that a go --
> > 
> >     # smartctl -t long /dev/ada5
> > 
> > This can be done while the disk is in use without upsetting anything.
> > It will scan the disk for unreadable areas.  The disk does have a number
> > of spare sectors it can use instead of any broken ones, but it generally
> > needs to see a failed write to the affected area to trigger the
> > substitution mechanism.  Once you run out of substitute sectors, the
> > disk is basically toast and should be replaced.  With modern drives,
> > seeing that mechanism in use at all typically means the drive is on the
> > downward spiral and you should plan on replacing it PDQ.
> > 
> > 	Cheers,
> > 
> > 	Matthew
> > 
> 
> Thanks, I kicked that off just now, it says it will take 169 min. to
> complete, so we'll see. No more new messages overnight, maybe my luck is
> good ....
> 
I agree with Matthew, and since your custom script seemed to ignore
all the items which I regard as relevant, after the long test has
finished run smartctl -a on that drive and look at things like
Reallocated Sector Count and Pending (if that is still present).
plus any other error fields.

ĸen
-- 
`I shall take my mountains', said Lu-Tze. `The climate will be good
for them.'     -- Small Gods