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I've recently noticed one of my 500Gb drives on the server is making very strange noises. It whirrs when opening files (ie, paging through images) and makes louder noises at random (ie, when not in use). It's a WD SATA (not a Raptor) and it's brand new. I'm curious if anyone can suggest what one does under Linux to test a drive that may be faulty: it contains a pile of important data (which I can easily move if necessary).

HDDs make noise, but this is louder than any of the half dozen other drives nearby, and I can hear it clearly from a meter away. I'd actually forgotten what the old HDD access noise even sounded like, but I've used Seagates almost exclusively for some years.

If it's ext2 or 3 you can use the disk util chk2fs, theres an option to check the disk surface iirc.

Yeah I'm using ext3. I'll give that a go - if I wanted to start logging HDD problems, how would I go about that? If there's a problem (and WD's aren't simply louder than Seagates) I'd like to catch it before I lose any data.

If you're running a standard distro there is probably already a daemon set up logging everything that happens, but I have no idea how to access the logs I've never had to.

LOL Yeah, neither have I. I've poked around some likely places, but haven't really turned anything up.

Check in /var/log. There should be files that the system log daemon writes to in there.

Stark wrote:I'm curious if anyone can suggest what one does under Linux to test a drive that may be faulty: it contains a pile of important data (which I can easily move if necessary).

A hard drive that shows no symptoms whatsoever could fail tomorrow.

Don't trust hard drives; if the data's really important, back it up.

Usually read errors (at least for me accessing nearly dead external drives) show up in /var/log/kern.log