On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 18:41:25 -0500,
"Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 07:20:27PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
> My damn powerbook drive recently failed with very little warning, other
> than I did notice that disk activity seemed to be getting a bit slower.
> IIRC it didn't log any errors or anything. Even if it did, if the OS was
> catching them I'd hope it would pop up a warning or something. But from
> what I've heard, some drives now-a-days will silently remap dead sectors
> without telling the OS anything, which is great until you've used up all
> of the spare sectors and there's nowhere to remap to. :(
You might look into smartmontools. One part of this is a daemon that runs
selftests on the disks on a regular basis. You can have warnings mailed to
you on various conditions. Drives will fail the self test before they
run out of spare sectors. There are other drive characteristics that can
be used to tell if drive failure is imminent and give you a chance to replace
a drive before it fails.