Re: [smartmontools-support] long test runs way too long

[Justin P. <jp...@lu...>]

On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, G. Vincent Castellano wrote:

> After having two large disks in my home server go bad, I am finally motivated 
> to start setting up smartd there and at my day job.  It's working out very 
> well so far except for a problem with my newest disk:
>
> Seagate Barracuda 500GB - 7200rpm - 100MBps Ultra ATA/100 (ATA-6)
>
> The smartd.conf looks contains a single line:
>
> DEVICESCAN -a -m gvc -M test -s (L/../../7/01|S/../../(1|2|3|4|5|6)/01)
>
> This started a long test as expected Sunday morning (2006-09-17) but over two 
> days later smartctl -a showed it 90% complete.  I might not have noticed it 
> but for the fact that the device throughput was terrible (I don't have the 
> exact numbers, but I think it was only allowing around a megabit per second). 
> When I start the test from the command line it estimates 255 runtime.
>
> I aborted the long test and performance returned to normal.  This disk is in 
> constant use as a repository for a (high-quality) MP3 stream, averaging 
> around 180 Mbps.
>
> Output of smartctl -a on the device is attached.
>
> Here are some entries from the smartd syslog output, I would be interested in 
> finding out how I can learn more about how to interpret these messages, even 
> if they don't indicate anything related to the long-test performance problem.
>
> Sep 17 04:19:51 tuvok smartd[23334]: Device: /dev/hdb, SMART Usage Attribute: 
> 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered changed from 49 to 50
> Sep 17 05:19:49 tuvok smartd[23334]: Device: /dev/hdb, SMART Usage Attribute: 
> 190 Unknown_Attribute changed from 49 to 50
> Sep 17 06:19:49 tuvok smartd[23334]: Device: /dev/hdb, SMART Prefailure 
> Attribute: 7 Seek_Error_Rate changed from 68 to 69
>
> --gvc
>

I noticed this as well on the Seagate 16MB/7200RPM/SATAII drives, I 
stopped long testing and do short tests only on those drives.

Justin.