Other(HW)

We have 5 Dell server collocated running CentOS 4.x and 5.x server operating system. Sometime my file system (ext3) goes read-only. I’d like to know what could be causing such a problem?

smartctl command controls the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into many ATA-3 and later ATA, IDE and SCSI-3 hard drives. The purpose of SMART is to monitor the reliability of the hard drive and predict drive failures, and to carry out different types of drive self-tests.

smartctl is a command line utility designed to perform SMART tasks such as printing the SMART self-test and error logs, enabling and disabling SMART automatic testing, and initiating device self-tests.

This article demonstrates usage of smartctl tool to test if hard disk is going bad.

The stress test of hardware (hard drive benchmarks) is a simplistic test. There are a number of benchmarking applications software that can be used as hard disk (storage) stress testing. My favorite is Bonnie++ software.

Bonnie++ is a benchmark suite that is aimed at performing a number of simple tests of hard drive and file system performance. Then you can decide which test is important and decide how to compare different systems after running it.

Quite by accident I found something that worked to remove minor scratches from the screen and face of my iPod Photo.

The introduction of Core 2 Duo about a month ago delivered a new processor with about a 25% improvement in performance over the fastest chips in the market. The top-line X6800, running at 2.93GHz, was the most flexible of the new processors, with completely unlocked multipliers up and down. This allowed settings like running the stock speed at a 12x multiplier (3.5GHz) at default voltage - the result of the incredible head room exhibited by the new Conroe processors.