HDD Dying - Get an alert when remounting RO?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 11:24:23AM -0600, Marc Lanctot wrote:
> I can't be of much help, but for what it's worth: I've attached a little 
> script I used from time to time to alert me of random things by using 
> at. If you put the following into a script and keep it running in a 
> terminal, it will do what you want. Not the best way to do it,  but it 
> should work.
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> HOME=/path/to/a/directory/on/the/root/drive
> DELAY=5
> 
> while /bin/true
> do
>   sleep $DELAY
>   touch $HOME/testfile || alert "Read-only :("
> done
> 
> I'm getting the same problems with one of my drives .. it's a Samsung 
> that came with the machine. I'd like a recommendation on hard drive 
> quality. A quick inspection tells me that Seagate is the classic best 
> but that Maxtor/Quantum is catching up. I have a second Western Digital 
> that has never had problems, but I heard they're quite slow so I kept it 
> as a storage/backup drive. This will be my main drive so I don't care 
> how much it costs as long as it will will be reliable.

I won't deal with seagate until they some day stop screwing up their
firmware.  The number of controllers for SATA that have had trouble with
seagate because they got clever in interpreting the spec is just stupid,
and they don't seem to have been particularly good at fixing that.

The drives might last quite well, if you ever get them to work with your
system in the first place.

Of course in my previous job, I saw no end of failed SCSI drives which
said IBM on them but were seagate drives inside.  They had a higher
failure rate than the IBM deskstars and even the old 40GB insta death
maxtors.

I will stick with WD for now.  Speed isn't everything.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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