Re: My First HDD Failure (I Think) [Solved]

On Fri, 22 Nov 2024 20:53:10 +0000, Farley Flud wrote:

 
My main drive, which contains my OS and other important
stuff, was reporting a reduction in speed from the usual
SATA 6 mbs/sec to 3 mbs/sec and then to 1.5 mbs/sec.
 

Although the kernel logs are overwritten, my memory is nearly
photographic and I recall, at least partially, the log entry:

ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient
limiting SATA link speed to 3.0 Gbps
ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient
limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps

Doing a Google search it does indeed appear that this drive
is on the verge of failure.

How incredible!

I have been using HDD drives for many years and I have NEVER
had a drive failure.  In fact, I have a 10-year-old HDD on
one of my machines that has been spinning for just as long
and it is still working great.

But, as I already indicated, the problem drive would function
normally after a power down and reboot of the system.  This
gave me enough time to copy all the files to a new HDD drive.
Otherwise I would have had to rely on my regular backup which
was already 4 weeks old -- and 4 weeks with a rolling distro
is like ancient history.

I have learned my lesson.  It is now weekly backups and I will
stockpile a few HDD drives at $100 a pop.

Also, I wonder how this issue would have fared with that piece-
of-shit OS known as Microslop Winblows.  With GNU/Linux the
kernel was able to throttle down and maintain some functionality.
With junk Microslop I doubt the same would have happened.



--
Systemd: solving all the problems that you never knew you had.