[plug] HD S.M.A.R.T monitoring under Linux

[Ben Jensz]

Craig Ringer wrote:

> The problem is that if your drive is an IBM DeskStar, maybe a few 
> years old, you're rather likely to NEED that drive utility. Then 
> again, if it hasn't died yet it probably won't. IBM had a massive run 
> of faulty drives that gave their drives the nickname 'DeathStar' and 
> caused people using them in RAID arrays to STILL lose data because 
> sometimes two or more would fail almost at once. This is suspected as 
> one of the reasons IBM sold their HDD business - they always denied 
> the problem, and there were indications they were unable to fix it.
>
Tell me about it... we had IBM Deathstars in all of our new desktop 
machines (25 machines).  I think we've had probably close to a 50% 
failure rate so far.  Several of the machines have also killed the 
warranty replaced IBM drives in them as well, one died within half an 
hour before it even made it back to the user (died during imaging).


/ Ben