More Seagates on the way out

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About this blog: Computers hate me. They really do. Every time I try to do something unusual like add new hardware, something is guaranteed to go wrong. I decided to start writing about my constant problems so that someone else might benefit from my experiences - or at least laugh at them!

27 May 2008, 12:11pm

I ordered a server from a USA based webhost, installed smartctl to check the SMART values of the two drives, and noticed with some concern that they were not new - they'd been powered on about 7 months. I expressed this concern to the host who said that used drives are better because they have "history."

At this point I could only giggle nervously, because I knew what could happen, given my luck... and it did. The reallocated sector count on one drive climbed from 1 to 308 within a couple of days; the second drive went from 1 to 5, and a short test failed with a read error.

The drives were quickly replaced but unfortunately they're also Seagate.

On the plus side, this event motivated me to figure out the config file for smartd, so I'm now emailed whenever a critical SMART value changes on any HD in my various servers (I currently have 5 local and 4 remote.)

Incidentally, these used drives had content from another customer on them... some sort of keyword based comment spamming tool by the looks of it. This isn't really an acceptable situation, allowing a new customer to see someone else's data. Whenever I hand back a server I always do a zero fill of the drive; you never know who's going to see it next.