[mythtv-users] SATA Drive Failure

Trey Boudreau trey at treysoft.com
Sat Jun 25 05:15:35 UTC 2005


On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 07:54:06PM -0700, Kelly wrote:
> 
> Think I've found a source of my constant crashing. I have a Maxtor
> SATA 250GB drive. I started poking around google and came up with the
> hdparm test. I ran it and got
> 
> Timing cached reads:   816 MB in  2.01 seconds 
> 
> A respectable IDE drive and do 3000mb in 2.00 seconds. 
> 
> So my drive is running at 20% efficiency. That will make a difference. 
> 
If you have a floppy disk and a supported SATA controller in the system
you might try running the Maxtor PowerMax testing software.

  http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

Perhaps it will tell you if your drive exhibits any problems.

Also, you don't mention the model number of your drive or the flags used
with hdparm.

As an apples-to-oranges comparison, I have five Maxtor MaxLine II Plus
250GB drives (model 7Y250M0) in a hardware RAID5 configuration (4 + 1
hot spare for 750GB storage) on a 3ware 8506 controller.  I can't use
hdparm on this configuration, but 'iozone -r 1m -s 1g' on an XFS volume
with 'blockdev --setra 16384 /dev/sda4' reports serial reads of
158698KB/s.

> If anyone has any ideas of what to do here I'm open. Other than that
> it looks like I'll be ripping it out of the front room and replacing
> the HD. 250GB are not cheep so not sure what I'm going to do with it.
> Too late to exchange it.
> 
Make sure your other components in the system don't cause problems.  Try
setting the read-ahead size with 'blockdev --setra'.  Tell us what you
use for filesystems on the drive.

Good luck.  Diagnosing/tuning hardware can tax one's patience.  Don't
give up, you'll like the results :-)

> kel
-- Trey


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