# Linux killing hard disks ?

## Hoshimaru

Hello, 

I've been using different Linux distributions thepbast few years. The last 2 year were only Gentoo.

Now, ever since I'm running Gentoo Linux 2006.0 and 2006.1 on my desktop and laptop, I've a problem with  hard disk failures.

With my desktop, a 250GB SATA HD, Gentoo started being awfully slow, but I didn't really consider a hard disk problem, since the system told me such things during the regular fs checks once ever N reboots.

In the end, it became unworkable and after a last reboot, the hard disk died.

I managed to save my emails and digital photographs, all the rest was bad blocks and the HD having extreme disk activity.

That's been like a month ago now, got another one, but didn't install Gentoo yet. I didn't even plugin the HD. I use Windows XP on an old 40GB HD atm.

My laptop, on the contrary to the desktop is a dual boot Windows XP Pro / Gentoo Linux using Grub.

I started having the same problems as with my desktop. A reboot with the livecd and running e2fsck returned errors. No bad blocks, but errors on inodes, which he repaired.

I rebooted the system, compiled a kernel and let it run idle for a few hours, then surfed a little with firefox, emerged gaim and the suddenly X freezes and a hell of disk activity. Cannot reboot, waited for hard disk to stop, system still frozen >> power off.

Wait a few minutes, start the laptop again >> no hard disk detected, nic boot procedure launched.

Waited for half an hour, hdd working, booted XP, making backups and so far no problem.

My guess is that the partitions where Linux reside get seriously damaged by something. The laptop ones are all EXT3, while the desktop was reiserfs.

By now, this costed me more than a Windows XP Professional license by now : 

3x 250GB HD @ 90 

1x LSI Megaraid 150-4 SATA ordered @ 269 

1x 2.5" 60GB HD : 80 

without the problems & data loss I've experienced... good thing it wasn't that important and got backups on DVD for the rest.

Is there anyone else experiencing this kind of problems ? 

Honestly, I'm getting very afraid of installing Gentoo, maybe Linux again now >____<

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## heikole

Obviously, yes, Linux is killing hard disks. You'd better try a floppy disk first for your own sake. 5 1/4 inches or 3 1/2 inches may be equal to you. Good luck. [EDIT]

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## PMcCauley

It could be true that Gentoo utilizes your HDD more than XP might if you are always updating and that sort of thing and that could result in a drive failing sooner than expected.  In short it is not possible for software to cause hardware issues, and in the rare cases that occurs it would pretty much be a fault in the hardware.   HDD failures are not that uncommon most drives will last 2-3 years depending on use and quality.  Also consider other hardware in the system, a faulty power supply could cause unusual drive failures you can buy a multimeter to check that or they also make power supply testers.  Also to note the HDD is probably the most common component to fail in a computer system.

Patrick

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## Hoshimaru

 *heikole wrote:*   

> Obviously, yes, Linux is killing hard disks. You'd better try a floppy disk first for your own sake. 5 1/4 inches or 3 1/2 inches may be equal to you. Good luck. [EDIT]

 

What kind of answer is that ? Really?

I'm just wondering, as it's the first time these things fail in the same month, with the same OS. I never ever got HD failures before. Not at home and not at work.

 *PMcCauley wrote:*   

> It could be true that Gentoo utilizes your HDD more than XP might if you are always updating and that sort of thing and that could result in a drive failing sooner than expected.  In short it is not possible for software to cause hardware issues, and in the rare cases that occurs it would pretty much be a fault in the hardware.   HDD failures are not that uncommon most drives will last 2-3 years depending on use and quality.  Also consider other hardware in the system, a faulty power supply could cause unusual drive failures you can buy a multimeter to check that or they also make power supply testers.  Also to note the HDD is probably the most common component to fail in a computer system.
> 
> Patrick

 

Thanks ^^

2-3 years is not very much. Too bad they break that easily -_-

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## Erlend

Exactly the same thing just happened to me today!  I was using X, it froze with disk activity going mad... then after a reboot one of my partitions (the / partition) was full of bad sectors (I take it this means the drive is a goner?)

I'm using the gentoo-sources 2.6.17 kernel I think.  My hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda ST3120026AS SATA 120GB.

I'd been recompiling my system after an upgrade to gcc 4.1.1... actually seriously considering switching to [x|k|u]buntu now, even though I've used Gentoo for about 2 years now and I'm otherwise happy with it.

One thing I noticed it that my drives (I have two drives in a raid 0 setup) are really quite hot (like almost too hot to touch).  There is no case-fan or anything cooling them down.

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## DieselPower

gentoo/linux is NOT killing harddrives here. Been using linux since 99 and the only time I've had a drive fail is when I decided to try hotpluging without hotswap support  :Razz:  Oh and another old 1.2 Gb drive failed in a thunderstorm with lots of quick power loss/restors. I have had very good luck with my drives. I also usuely stick with maxtor drives. I like their warrenty.

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## ttuegel

 *Erlend wrote:*   

> One thing I noticed it that my drives (I have two drives in a raid 0 setup) are really quite hot (like almost too hot to touch).  There is no case-fan or anything cooling them down.

 

That will kill your hard drives faster than just about anything else.  High temperatures are absolutely awful for hard drives, or anything else really.  DieselPower is probably right: I doubt it's Gentoo/Linux killing your equipment.  Hard drives are meant to operate at temperatures where they should just be a little warm to the touch, or cooler.  If you can't get them where a case fan will draw air over them (they don't necessarily need to be right next to one), you should seriously consider investing in a hard-drive cooler if you want to keep your hard drives longer.

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## Keruskerfuerst

What type of harddisks are you using?

From what manufacturer?

I had a Maxtor HDD, which died after 1 year. And the trip through service wonderland (warranty) was not sucessfull. Haha!

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## drescherjm

I think the real problem is that drives are so cheap lately that the companys making them do very little testing if any. In my department I have purchased around 50 SATA hard drives 250GB to 330GB ( maxtor, western digital, seagate) in the last year and around 5 of them were either DOA or went bad in the first 3 months.

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## drescherjm

 *Quote:*   

> was full of bad sectors (I take it this means the drive is a goner?) 

 

You should never see a single bad sector from any drive made in the last few years. This is a sure sign of a drive going bad.

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## Hoshimaru

The first drive to die was a 250GB SATA drive, a Maxtor one. I was 15 months old.

The laptop HD is a Toshiba MK6025GAS.

Smart told me the Toshiba disk was around 45°C I think that's a little high... but then again, I've don't really know what an acceptable temperature might be for a hard disk?

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## Erlend

 *Quote:*   

> Smart told me the Toshiba disk was around 45°C I think that's a little high... but then again, I've don't really know what an acceptable temperature might be for a hard disk?

 

That's not that high, but it depends on the hard drive.  For yours the manual is at: http://sdd.toshiba.com/localcache/82000000293800000BBB0000000100000000.pdf#search=%22MK6025GAS%22 and your operating temperature must be kept below 60C on the top and bottom plates.

 *Quote:*   

> What type of harddisks are you using?
> 
> From what manufacturer? 

 

I'm using two Seagate Barracuda ST3120026AS Sata 150 drives.  I've had them for almost three years now.

 *Quote:*   

> Hard drives are meant to operate at temperatures where they should just be a little warm to the touch, or cooler.

 

Hmm, the drives were uncomfortably hot to touch just after the computer was turned off.

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> If you can't get them where a case fan will draw air over them (they don't necessarily need to be right next to one),

 

Don't actually think I have a case fan!  It's a Dell Dimension 8300.  Maybe the PSU fan (at the other end of the case) acts like a case fan though?

 *Quote:*   

> you should seriously consider investing in a hard-drive cooler if you want to keep your hard drives longer.

 

Yeah I think I will.  The ventilation is that part of the case is dreadful.  They are right next to three PCI/AGP cards: the graphics card (ati radeon), the sound card, and the promise fasttrak controller, none of which can be helping airflow.  There is no space really between the two hard drives - they are possibly heating each other up!

I like my computer to be quiet-ish (I think the plastic case helps), so I think I'll go for either a small 20mm fan or a heatsink.  Maybe I should increase the air gap between the drives?

I'm using libata with md for software raid... will my hard drives spin down when they aren't used when using these drivers?

Thanks!

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## Keruskerfuerst

Leaving one bay between drives (HDD, burners, etc.) reduces the operating temperature of these units.

I have drilled 178 5mm holes in the front of my computer case.

So cool air flows in the computer case and cools the harddrives.

Operating temperature of my HDDs: 30°C.

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## Erlend

To be honest, I might just ditch the second hard drive an keep using the one that works in a non-raid setup.  There is a lot of controversy over whether raid0 really speeds things up.

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## drescherjm

 *Quote:*   

> There is a lot of controversy over whether raid0 really speeds things up.

 

Well it depends. It did in the past when drives got 10MB/s STR but now the latest SATA2 disks get 67 to 75 MB/s STR but are not much better at seeks than the drives that did 10 MB/s. The problem with that is that the files most people use most are so small that the time it takes to seek is not insignifigant.  Remember, RAID 0 provides no help for seeks and may actually hurt if the drives don't seek at the same rate. It ends up that with RAID0 you will get no where near 2X the performance if you don't read/write in large chunks and if most of your reads/writes are small (less than 1MB) you will have little benifit with double the risk of data loss.

So the questions

Are all of the files that you load > 1 MB? Does your application try to load the whole file in memory? Do you have 2 GB of memory or more? Do you backup your data nightly or more?

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## Erlend

 *Quote:*   

> Are all of the files that you load > 1 MB?

 

Not all of them... a good few are though.  Mostly pictures (8MP), music (192kbps ogg) and some videos.

 *Quote:*   

> Do you have 2 GB of memory or more?

 

My computer never uses all it's RAM anyways, I only have 512MB.

 *Quote:*   

> Do you backup your data nightly or more?

 

Yeah I do.

EDIT: maybe two drives would be better used by putting the filesystems on one, and the journals on the other, and striping the swap file across both drives?

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## Erlend

Is drive cache supported by the libata driver, and by md linuxraid?

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## DynamicPink

I ran Gentoo on a Pentium 233 NEC laptop with a 4 GB drive. The machine was on for months at a time and would emerge --sync, emerge -uDf world every few days. I never had any problems using ReiserFS 3 first and EXT3 later, Gentoo ran perfectly on it. The world updates would also use the swap file due to the limited memory, so it was really abusive on the disk. 

I would guess that heat killed your machine. Someone I know had a pair of brand new Western Digial drives in a raid array and it started to corrupt under Windows XP within a few weeks with bad sectors. Personally, I don't see the need for raid on a home machine.

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## Erlend

Can anybody point me towards an article on putting the filesystem journal on a separate drive please?  Is it only possible to do that with reiserfs?

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## Keruskerfuerst

You can find a complete description of Reiserfs here: http://www.namesys.com/Last edited by Keruskerfuerst on Mon Sep 18, 2006 5:09 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## drescherjm

 *Quote:*   

> Can anybody point me towards an article on putting the filesystem journal on a separate drive please?

 

XFS and JFS and do this. There is a nice article about the linux filesystems here http://www.unisys.com/products/insights/insights__compendium/Linux_File_Systems_Comparative_Performance_White_Paper_1-6-06.pdf

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## drescherjm

 *Quote:*   

> EDIT: maybe two drives would be better used by putting the filesystems on one, and the journals on the other, and striping the swap file across both drives?

 

This really depends on your read/write pattern. If the drive will be constantly alternating between reading on one partition to a second partition on the same disk this is not a good idea. In this case I would put the journel for the first disk at the start of the second disk and the journel for the second disk at the start of the first disk. I have never used a separate journel so this is just based on trying to optimize seeks on both drives.

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