Re: a Maxtor story (was: Drive Ready seek errors)

[markus reichelt <mr@lists.notified.de>]

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Brandon Evans <maillists@hosttuls.com> wrote:
> These are all 120 Gig hardrives, some Seagate, some Maxtor, and some 
> western digital,

I've had nothing but trouble with Maxtor's Diamond Plus series. A few
months ago I bought 3 120Gig drives and set up a linux box which
worked like a charm. One day I noticed that a partition located
within the 30-40% of cylinders of one drive was giving bad data read
results, about 1-2 MB/s[1]. So I ran a full fsck which took a long
time but worked out fine. Over time, the other drives showed exactly
the same symptoms.

Since areas where bad data read results appeared were spreading I
first used the smart daemon tools to check if the drives were
failing. I haven't got the logs anymore but it was suggested to run a
full diagnostic. So I did with Maxtor's PowerMAX utility.

I got the diagnostic code de699c79 along with a message that the hard
drive is failing. At first the code was not accepted at Maxtor's
online warranty site located at
http://www.maxtor.com/de/support/service/warranty_ata.htm (it is by
now, btw) so I contacted the support. It was suggested to low level
format the drive and I did as suggested but running PowerMAX
afterwards still gave the same diagnostic code.

In the end no data was lost (due to a paranoid backup strategy) and
all Maxtor drives were replaced by WD ones. For me, buying Maxtor
drives is considered A Bad Thing.

[1] I used the same partition layout for all 3 drives (with ext3 fs),
no RAID whatsoever, so it was easy to track and locate the problem.
FWIW, the server is/was used for several large MySQL databases and
raw analytical data of some spectrometers.

- -- 
Bastard Administrator in $hell

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