Sunday, May 14, 2006

Gotta get a new hard drive

It might be time for me to spring for one of those shiny, new 7200RPM drives I've been eyeing off for a little while now. Plus, I'm starting to struggle with 80GB, it's not quite enough!

After leaving the lappie off overnight, and the drive's cooled down to 15 degrees (as opposed to the 44 degrees it was running at last night) I've been able to successfully copy my FileVault image off the drive with zero problems. After trying last night, the SMART error log now contains 46 entries - all seemingly general I/O errors - DMA Read and Writes, Flushing the Cache and reading the SMART status.
Whatever is up with the drive, it doesn't seem to be happy, and while it's not coming up with bad sectors, the SMART logs have reported that there have been sectors remapped, and these general I/O errors are a bit of a concern as well.
It is strange that Disk Utility still thinks it's all OK. Even since last night, there were 291 reallocated events counted in the log, and this morning there are now 313. There were 695 reallocated sectors, now it's at 745 - so this is hard evidence (to me at least) that the SMART status reported in Disk Utility is not to be trusted.

According to smartctl, a Reallocated Event is related to Old Age, whereas an actual Reallocated Sector is a Prefail indicator, so why isn't Disk Utility picking this up?
Time to log something at the Apple Bug Reporter.

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