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From: Paul E Condon on 8 Apr 2010 20:50
I want to use the low cost high capacity hard drives that are
for sale in places like Best Buy and Costco. I have put ext3 on
several of them and started experimenting. The results so far
are puzzling.

I do get errors. So I decided to do scans for bad blocks. The drives
I'm using are all Western Digital because they have been the lowest
cost at the times I buy at Costco. Also all are 500GB.

e2fsck -c <device> is supposed to scan for bad blocks and allocate them
to a special inode so that they cannot be used. It runs for 3 to 4
hours and then says its finished with no indication of how many bad
blocks it found.

dumpe2fs -b <device> is supposed to print the bad blocks that have
been marked on a device. When I run it, it prints nothing. I find it
hard to believe that a 500GB HD contains ZERO bad blocks. Especially
one on which I have witnessed error messages about I/O errors in
writing the journal. I can find no information about what, exactly,
dumpe2fs is supposed to print. The wording seems to be that it prints
the contents of the bad blocks. But in other places it seems that it
prints a list of block numbers, or maybe cylinder/sector/head. Since I
see nothing, I don't have a clue as to what I should see.

Has anyone ever used these programs? Have you ever seen useful output?
What SHOULD they do (with a little more specificity and believability)?

--
Paul E Condon
pecondon(a)mesanetworks.net


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From: Ron Johnson on 8 Apr 2010 21:30
On 2010-04-08 19:44, Paul E Condon wrote:
> I want to use the low cost high capacity hard drives that are
> for sale in places like Best Buy and Costco. I have put ext3 on
> several of them and started experimenting. The results so far
> are puzzling.
>
> I do get errors. So I decided to do scans for bad blocks. The drives
> I'm using are all Western Digital because they have been the lowest
> cost at the times I buy at Costco. Also all are 500GB.
>
> e2fsck -c <device> is supposed to scan for bad blocks and allocate them
> to a special inode so that they cannot be used. It runs for 3 to 4
> hours and then says its finished with no indication of how many bad
> blocks it found.
>
[snip]
>
> Has anyone ever used these programs? Have you ever seen useful output?
> What SHOULD they do (with a little more specificity and believability)?
>

Not a direct answer to your question, but: I never leave home
without -vfFC0. (The Unix Way is to "say something" only upon
failure, but I like continuous feedback.)

--
Dissent is patriotic, remember?


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From: Camaleón on 9 Apr 2010 02:40
On Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:44:33 -0600, Paul E Condon wrote:

> I want to use the low cost high capacity hard drives that are for sale
> in places like Best Buy and Costco. I have put ext3 on several of them
> and started experimenting. The results so far are puzzling.
>
> I do get errors. So I decided to do scans for bad blocks. The drives
> I'm using are all Western Digital because they have been the lowest cost
> at the times I buy at Costco. Also all are 500GB.

(...)

Try passing the SMART test (by using the manufacturer's test disk or
"smartctl", but as they are attached to a USB port, smartmontools may
have problems to detect and scan the device).

It won't tell you a concrete number of "bad blocks", but higher values in
"Reallocated Sectors Count" could give you an idea about the remapping
operations performed by the disk (the lower the better).

Greetings,

--
Camaleón


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From: Greg Madden on 9 Apr 2010 03:00
On Thursday 08 April 2010 04:44:33 pm Paul E Condon wrote:
> I want to use the low cost high capacity hard drives that are
> for sale in places like Best Buy and Costco. I have put ext3 on
> several of them and started experimenting. The results so far
> are puzzling.
>
> I do get errors. So I decided to do scans for bad blocks. The drives
> I'm using are all Western Digital because they have been the lowest
> cost at the times I buy at Costco. Also all are 500GB.
>
> e2fsck -c <device> is supposed to scan for bad blocks and allocate them
> to a special inode so that they cannot be used. It runs for 3 to 4
> hours and then says its finished with no indication of how many bad
> blocks it found.
>
> dumpe2fs -b <device> is supposed to print the bad blocks that have
> been marked on a device. When I run it, it prints nothing. I find it
> hard to believe that a 500GB HD contains ZERO bad blocks. Especially
> one on which I have witnessed error messages about I/O errors in
> writing the journal. I can find no information about what, exactly,
> dumpe2fs is supposed to print. The wording seems to be that it prints
> the contents of the bad blocks. But in other places it seems that it
> prints a list of block numbers, or maybe cylinder/sector/head. Since I
> see nothing, I don't have a clue as to what I should see.
>
> Has anyone ever used these programs? Have you ever seen useful output?
> What SHOULD they do (with a little more specificity and believability)?
>
> --
> Paul E Condon
> pecondon(a)mesanetworks.net

I used 'smartmontools' AFAIKT, lots of drives have errors, errors get re-mapped by
the hd firmware, some drives are more accurate than others. Never did get
straight, but the drives keep working. smartmontools uses badblocks , if memory
serves.

--
Greg Madden
Precision Air Balance, Inc.
Phone: (907)276-0461


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From: Ron Johnson on 9 Apr 2010 11:30
On 2010-04-08 20:27, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 2010-04-08 19:44, Paul E Condon wrote:
>> I want to use the low cost high capacity hard drives that are
>> for sale in places like Best Buy and Costco. I have put ext3 on
>> several of them and started experimenting. The results so far
>> are puzzling.
>> I do get errors. So I decided to do scans for bad blocks. The drives
>> I'm using are all Western Digital because they have been the lowest
>> cost at the times I buy at Costco. Also all are 500GB.
>>
>> e2fsck -c <device> is supposed to scan for bad blocks and allocate them
>> to a special inode so that they cannot be used. It runs for 3 to 4
>> hours and then says its finished with no indication of how many bad
>> blocks it found.
>>
> [snip]
>>
>> Has anyone ever used these programs? Have you ever seen useful output?
>> What SHOULD they do (with a little more specificity and believability)?
>>
>
> Not a direct answer to your question, but: I never leave home without
> -vfFC0. (The Unix Way is to "say something" only upon failure, but I
> like continuous feedback.)
>

(The "dumpe2fs -b" command should show you all your bad blocks.)

Here's the result of me checking for bad blocks:

# e2fsck -c -vfFC0 /dev/mapper/main_huge_vg-main_huge_lv
e2fsck 1.41.10 (10-Feb-2009)
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): done

BIG_LV: Updating bad block inode. <<<<<<<<<< Note!!
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure

Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity

Pass 4: Checking reference counts

Pass 5: Checking group summary information



BIG_LV: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

301084 inodes used (0.12%)
14172 non-contiguous files (4.7%)
121 non-contiguous directories (0.0%)
# of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks: 0/0/0
Extent depth histogram: 294700/6219
560591687 blocks used (58.03%)
0 bad blocks
128 large files

292926 regular files
7972 directories
0 character device files
0 block device files
0 fifos
0 links
177 symbolic links (155 fast symbolic links)
0 sockets
--------
301075 files

--
Dissent is patriotic, remember?


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