[plug] server failing with bizarre disk errors

[Richard Meyer]

>> Old ATI chipset with a Celeron 400 from when it was the best thing any
home
>> user could contemplate having.

>... except a Pentium. That said, the older celerons were far less
>crippled than the new P4 celery.

In those days, nobody could afford the faster Pentiums - seemed to be an
affordability gap between the 133-233 MHz Pentiums and the 400-600 MHz
Pentiums that the Celerons filled nicely.

>>  hda is 20GB Seagate, and hdb is a 13GB
>> "Bigfoot" - which I think was a WD drive. Problems appear to start on
hdb,
>> except that my main distro (SuSE) resides there, and it (almost) never
has
>> these problems. In fact checked the logs last night and there was
nothing
>> for the past 2 weeks - even though it'd been on 90% of the time, running
>> SETI at home. (OK, not particularly disk intensive - but it didn't whine
when
>> I did a few things before shutdown, and the "updatedb" jobs ran
perfectly
>> every night.)

>I have found the Quantum BigFoot drives to be reliable storage, if you
>can live with the quirks. They don't like some BIOSs and other hard
>disks, tending to do funny things like misreport geometry on boot.
>They're also about the slowest harddisk in the universe.

Oh, I don't know - my first PC had a 10MB MFM drive with a seek time of
about 120ms. Those were the days when you still used to use Spinrite to
adjust your interleave. A seek time of 70 ms was darn near miraculous. Ah,
you've got me reminiscing now. Reminiscing is "old f*rt language" for
boring the cr*p out of everyone.

It has worked well, and I have to agree that it plods, but it does the job.

>I don't get logs of the disk errors - its like all ATA writes /stop/
>when the errors ocurr.

That might explain it, but once these errors start, I usually have to
reboot to get rid of them.

>Have you enabled S.M.A.R.T and queried your drives (if possible)?

I think S.M.A.R.T is enabled - will have to read up on how to query them.

>I've just moved the drives on my problem server to separate interfaces,
>clocked down the CPU, disabled the parallel port and clocked down the
>RAM. It /seems/ to be behaving now, but it'll be hard to say for sure
>for a few days.

Mine work fine for weeks, and then the trouble starts.