Let's see, 56 GB to go at hmm, 40 MB per second, which will drop down to 30 or so by the time it gets to the inner tracks, so call it 35 on average, that's 1600 seconds, a bit under half an hour, and this particular ϖ∂* run will be over.

It's done nearly 150 GB without errors, and normally it spluts within the first few minutes.

What's the difference?

I'm only testing one drive at a time.

I've run into this once before, and it's really, really nasty: With certain revisions of certain SATA controllers, everything works perfectly if you only have one such card in the machine. Things start to get a little flaky if you install a second identical card, but you can't track it down.

But, if you run ϖ∂ or some other stress test that runs both cards flat out at the same time, you get inundated with spurious errors.

I couldn't tell that this was happening because on this particular system, the spurious errors caused a "screaming interrupt" which effectively locked up the system. On the previous system, I could at least see that running two copies of ϖ∂ at once would report huge numbers of errors, which would stop immediately if one copy of ϖ∂ was terminated.

About 34 GB to go now. I think maybe the Promise SATA150-TX4.

28 GB to go. The thing I couldn't understand was that it looked like I had two bad drives and two bad controllers, which just didn't make any sense. Bad drives are a common enough phenomenon here at Pixy Central, but two out of four brand new drives and the controller card and the motherboard chipset? Seems a bit much even given the infamous Pixy Central Entropy Field.

22 GB to go. If I order now, I should get the card for the weekend, which would be nice.

This still leaves unexplained the spluttage of the IDE raidset. I guess I'll have to chalk that one up to gremlins.

14 GB to go. Order placed. Pity I didn't work this out at the time I was building the machine. Sigh.

Test completed, no errors. That's three done. Now, /dev/sda seems to be poigled right now from previous tests, so I'm going to reboot and run the test again.

Uh-oh, no rebootee. Have to wait until I get home tonight.

* Latterly known as badblocks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:21 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)