Hard drive failing?

Hactar · *nix forums beginner Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 23

OK, I don't know where the problem is.

I have two identical "120 GB" PATA hard drives (Hitachi Deskstar:
http://www.hd4less.com/ibmdes18uath.html ). I also have a cron job that
copies one onto the other as a backup. The HDs used to be hda &
hdc, then hda & hdb (new case, cables wouldn't reach the other way). I
started to get DMA errors attributed to hdb (backup), so I moved them to
main=hda, DVD1=hdc, backup=hdd (disconnecting DVD2). I got errors
attributed to hda, so I guessed that the IDE1 controller (instead of
hdb) was failing.

I moved stuff around again, so now it's DVD1=hda, DVD2=hdb, main=hdc,
backup=hdd. I don't get any errors, but transfers hdc->hdd vary from
a normal 27-28 MB/s anywhere down to half that. I did a complete dump
"dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/null bs=128k" and it ran at >40 MB/s. Same for
hdd. (I wasn't watching for the ~45 minutes it ran; I took dd's word.)
I ran badblocks on them both and came up with nothing.

I don't want to just throw hardware at the problem; how do I find out
whether it's the IDE controller or one of the hard drives that needs
replacing? And if it's the IDE controller, has anyone used a PCI ->
ATA adapter?

--
-eben QebWenE01R@vTerYizUonI.nOetP royalty.no-ip.org:81

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein

joseph2k · *nix forums beginner Joined: 01 Jul 2006 Posts: 19

Hactar wrote:

Google