On Sun, 12 Aug 2018 11:01:27 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

> Never had real harddisk failures apart from the one I once dropped...
> Seagate used to work OK, got myself a 1 TB seagate USB (one of the
> first), had some problem wit the software, contacted their online
> helpdesk. "We do not support Linux". Told them they had really great
> drives, and never bought a seagate again.
>
There was a consumer-grade 3.5" drive that PC World sold here when a 20MB
or 40MB drive was still a big deal - I forget the brand name, but
remember that it had a 3 year guarantee, but it used to fail at 18 months
quite regularly. I had at least three of them. Fortunately they failed by
becoming really, really slow, so on the one or two occasions when I
didn't have a fully recent backup, you could leave it for an hour or two
and the last backup would complete. After a while I became suspicious and
started tracking disk life: when I found they failed so regularly and
frequently I switched to WD because Seagate already had a somewhat dodgy
reputation.

> There are some utilities for the PC to see how long it was on etc:
>
Full agreement about using smartd. Properly installed, it just quietly
keeps working in the background: all my Linux systems except the RPi have
it installed. On a Linux system smartd is typically run by a pair of
cronjobs that do daily short checks and a longer weekly one. You only see
a daily report if smartd finds problems. The weekly report is always
done. Both are included in the daily logwatch report. NOTE that by
default the logwatch reports accumulate under root, but its simple enough
to redirect all root mail to your main email address.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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