Greetings,
I've been experiencing a lot of slowness in general when the system attempts
to read from the hard drive disk. I use Debian 10 Buster with the MATE desktop
environment and simple things like opening the calendar applet or right
clicking to open the context menu takes longer than usual. I noticed the LED
indicator than turns on when reading from the disk also took longer to turn
off, so I decided to inspect the logs and I ran into these entries:
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.853537] ata6.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct
0x40000000 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.853544] ata6.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.853550] ata6.00: failed command: READ
FPDMA QUEUED
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.853559] ata6.00: cmd
60/08:f0:10:96:2b/00:00:01:00:00/40 tag 30 ncq dma 4096 in
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.853559] res
41/40:00:10:96:2b/00:00:01:00:00/00 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.853563] ata6.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.853566] ata6.00: error: { UNC }
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.855102] ata6.00: configured for UDMA/133
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.855121] sd 5:0:0:0: [sda] tag#30 FAILED
Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.855126] sd 5:0:0:0: [sda] tag#30 Sense
Key : Medium Error [current]
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.855130] sd 5:0:0:0: [sda] tag#30 Add.
Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.855135] sd 5:0:0:0: [sda] tag#30 CDB:
Read(10) 28 00 01 2b 96 10 00 00 08 00
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.855139] print_req_error: I/O error, dev
sda, sector 19633680
Dec 23 22:33:24 sigma kernel: [ 1250.855162] ata6: EH complete
They happen every time the system experiences slow reads. Now, I did some
research and I've read some possible causes like a bad SATA cable or a
malfunctioning HDD or PSU. I booted from a Debian installer on an USB stick
and I ran fsck.ext4 to check the disk and it printed the partition was clean.
Given that fsck didn't print anything unusual, I decided to replace the SATA
cable. However, it's still happening.
The HDD is a 1TB 3.5" WD Blue SATA drive which was bought a year ago.
I'm certain this is not a software problem because I've been running the
system a whole year without any problem. Has anyone ever experienced this? Is
there a way I can reliably find the faulty component (HDD, PSU...) without
buying a new one and hoping that solves it?
Thank you very much in advance.
