On 2024-01-09 at 11:21, Michael Kjörling wrote: > On 9 Jan 2024 08:11 -0500, from wande...@fastmail.fm (The Wanderer): > >> Within the past few weeks, I got root-mail notifications from >> smartd that the ATA error count on two of the drives had increased >> - one from 0 to a fairly low value (I think between 10 and 20), the >> other from 0 to 1. I figured this was nothing to worry about - >> because of the relatively low values, because the other drives had >> not shown any such thing, and because of the expected stability and >> lifetime of good-quality SSDs. >> >> >> On Sunday (two days ago), I got root-mail notifications from >> smartd about *all* of the drives in the array. This time, the total >> error counts had gone up to values in the multiple hundreds per >> drive. Since then (yesterday), I've also gotten further >> notification mails about at least one of the drives increasing >> further. So far today I have not gotten any such notifications. > > A single or a few bad blocks is nothing to be overly concerned > about. I had an Intel SSD which lived a long, healthy, happy life > with one bad sector and never gave any signs of further problems. > > Hundreds of bad blocks per drive is certainly cause for concern. > > More worrying is a _significant increase in the rate of increase_ of > the bad blocks count. That suggests that the drive is suffering from > some underlying problem.
Do you read the provided excerpt from the SMART data as indicating that there are hundreds of bad blocks, or that they are rising rapidly? The Runtime_Bad_Block count for that drive is nonzero, but it is only 31. What's high and seems as if it may be rising is the Uncorrectable_Error_Cnt value (attribute 187) - which I understand to represent *incidents* in which the drive attempted to read a sector or block and was unable to do so. >> So... as the Subject asks, should I be worried? How do I interpret >> these results, and at what point do they start to reflect something >> to take action over? If there is not reason to be worried, what >> *do* these alerts indicate, and at what point *should* I start to >> be worried about them? > > At an absolute minimum, were it me, I would refresh my backups. As > 8-wide RAID-6 of 2TB drives nets you about 12 TB of storage, I'd say > get yourself a ~16 TB external rotational HDD and set up to backup > onto it. You should have backups anyway; there's no time like the > present to get started. I've ordered a 22TB external drive for the purpose of creating such a backup. Fingers crossed that things last long enough for it to get here and get the backup created. > You are admittedly in a much better position than many; if the > errors are randomly located, odds are that you have sufficient > redundancy to manage within the storage array. That's what I'm relying on. > The good part is if you look at SMART attributes 5 and 179; taken in > combination, I take them as indication that all (31) reallocated > sectors have been reallocated into the spare sectors pool, and this > represents approximately 2% of the spare sectors pool. The fact that this is the same value as the Runtime_Bad_Block count (attribute 183) is something I'd noticed before sending that mail, and is probably not a coincidence. > Absolutely do keep an eye on attribute 179. If the spare sectors > pool start to fill up, the drive won't be able to reallocate any > further sectors, and your RAID array won't do you much good. > > I would also keep an eye out for I/O errors in the kernel log, but > be mindful of which devices they are coming from. dmesg does have what appears to be an error entry for each of the events reported in the alert mails, correlated with the devices in question. I can provide a sample of one of those, if desired. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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