What a Weekend...
Posted by Trejkaz Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:55:00 GMT
I bought myself a nice new, 300GB SATA hard drive on Friday, as I’d finally saved up the money for it. On Saturday I eventually hooked it up, and started moving across the data which was outgrowing my older 120GB drive.
The copy process was taking forever to do from the console so I thought I would do it through KDE just to see the rate it was copying at, and it turns out it was doing an average of around 6MB/s (only slightly faster than copying a file across the network.) I was quick to blame the Linux SATA support at first, but then I started doing some more tests…
- Copying files from the old drive to the new drive = 6MB/s
- Copying files from the new drive to itself = 35MB/s
- Copying files from the new drive to the old drive = 30MB/s
What the? And lo and behold:
- Copying files from the old drive to itself = 10MB/s.
So, the old drive was on the way out and it took this new drive to tell me. SMART gave no errors nor warnings… as far as it was concerned, the drive had a clean bill of health.
The old drive, thankfully, is still under warranty, so getting it replaced was not an issue, though it would mean sending the thing back to the manufacturers. The real issue was that this drive had my boot partition and practically all my data on it, and it all had to be shuffled around.
After a couple of hours of indecision, I eventually decided to sacrifice my old 20GB backup drive to become the new boot drive (200MB /boot, 4GB swap, 800MB /, 15GB unallocated for now.) My old /boot and / moved across to that.
Then the new 300GB got split 40GB unallocated (future plan is to move my Windows dual boot onto that), 260GB LVM.
Ah, LVM… it saved me so much time. For /usr, /var, /home and /data were all on LVM, and it only took me one command to move them all off the old drive, and another command to remove the old drive from the volume group. After that, everything was fairly happy and I rebooted with the backup drive as primary master and the new drive as secondary slave.
I did attempt to shred the data on the drive, though I was only able to do about 5 passes before the thing would lock up (more proof that the drive is about to die) and gave up after that, disconnecting it permanently.
The only immediately irritating thing left is that my machine locked up overnight even while the old drive was disconnected. I hope that this is either due to the newer kernel I’m now running, or the newer NVIDIA driver (NVIDIA are already a good scapegoat, because their driver crashes so goddamn often.) I will update the kernel to a newer one, and perhaps downgrade that NVIDIA driver back to what I was using before which was known to be stable (it’s not like I’m running a cutting-edge card anyway.)
Anyway, incidents like this make software feel stable as a rock. And they really make you thank Linux for LVM because I would have wasted a lot of time buggering around with partitions if I weren’t using it. :-)