[colug-432] I/O Errors

[Rick Hornsby]

On Jan 25, 2013, at 19:29 , Thomas Cranston <thomas.w.cranston at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am getting I/O errors on new (less than 2 months) Seagate 750 GB laptop bare drive. 88 bad sectors. Mint Disk GUI reports Disk is OK, 88 bad sectors. I am returning to Amazon for replacement. I saw nothing negative about Seagate when I was shopping, but now see lots of negative reviews.

Every once in a while you get a bad drive.  This particular line of 750GB drives may have a high failure rate (perhaps the price paid for real engineering not yet catching up with the storage capacity of that form factor), or maybe the batch had some production issues and that's why all the negative reviews.  Hard to say.  I've opened a package of new batteries a couple of times over the years to find them all dead.

-[snip]-

> After this operation, 1,289 kB of additional disk space will be used.
> dpkg: error: reading package info file '/var/lib/dpkg/available': Input/output error
> 
> 
> Wondering if the size (in GB) is a problem? I am under the impression that bad sectors is not good and that the drive should be replaced regardless that the GUI says it is bad.

I would absolutely concur with this statement.  Any drive that has bad sectors out of the box, unless I _really_ don't give a flying rat about my data, I would wipe as best I could and exchange it.  If I have really sensitive data on it, I'd just buy a new one and test the hell out of it before putting anything I might not want other people to see - just in case it is bad also so I don't get burned twice.

I know that drives are designed to be able to tolerate a certain number of bad sectors and recover without incident, but I don't personally mess around with that.  If I have a drive that is actually reporting bad sectors instead of just silently mapping away from them, I'm getting everything off of that drive ASAP.

> Will see how the next drive holds up. Any suggestions if the next drive fails soon?

With a massive consolidation over the last few years, your choices are kind of limited.  Seagate and Western Digital are pretty much the two big players in the aftermarket drive world.  You have some OEM guys like Hitatchi.  I'd be willing to bet that you just ended up with a bad drive, and that it really isn't an issue with Seagate.

However, there is an outside shot that your controller is bad, or you have power supply issues.  If a second "new" drive fails in a similar way, I'd take a hard look at the host controller and the computer itself. What sucks is that if the controller is at fault, you're looking at replacing the entire mainboard.  For a laptop out of warranty, a replacement might be in your future.

One other thing that I can think of that is not very likely, but possible - physical deformation of the laptop case interfering with the operation of the drive.  The 2.5" drives are extremely fragile, especially compared to their larger beast-like 3.5" brethren.  The 2.5" drive shell is very soft and flexible. A very small amount of pressure transferred from pushing down too hard on the palm rest, or a laptop's bent inner frame, possibly from being dropped, and then a slight twist while moving the laptop, etc would be all it would take.

Side note to your first point -- there was an interesting The is the Modern World article about online reviews a few weeks ago, "Review Sites are Broken" - http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/05/review-sites-are-broken/


-rick