zaterdag 17 september 2011

harddisk firmware warnings

A while ago I bought 2 new harddisks. They were Samsung EcoGreen HD204UI's. Great value in my opinion. Since I don't trust harddisks I put ZFS on them. That will give me a bit more faith to keep my data. Faith... no guarantees. Software bugs could still kill all data on there. But I disgress.
How big was my surprise when, a couple of weeks later, I just happened to read a forum post about these drives having some problems when using smart functionality (check here for details: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks). I have these drives running under Linux. Smart checks my disks periodically. If data would happen to get written to the disk just at the moment that a smart command would be issued, I'd end up with a bad sector. WTF!
I was able to find the patch that Samsung put on their websites by googling for it. There was no link to it on the samsung product page for these drives. These was no announcement. I patched the drives and they have been humming happily ever since.

But what about my other drives? Are they ok? Do they have problems that warrant a firmware update? How do I find out when drive makers don't willingly publish such information in fear of such things hurting sales? I have no idea. The most logical way to find out is to run into trouble. I won't spend the time googling the internet every month to try and find this out. I should be notified. Isn't that what 'registering your product' is for? Registrations have never done anything for me.

Hard disk manufacturers should step up and provide at least some way of getting notified. If they don't, someone may do it for them.

Geen opmerkingen:

Een reactie posten