Possible hard drive failure soon

[JC]

This afternoon, all of a sudden, load went up 3 fold on one of my servers and kept up for hours (still high).
A quick check with top reveals a higher IO than usual but nothing seems out of the ordinary as far as tasks running is concerned.

I suspect one of the Raid disks is having problems.

Can someone please help by inspecting this output from iostat:

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s   rsec/s   wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util
sda               2.08    24.62   27.06   29.21  3277.09   980.00    75.65     0.49    8.75   3.21  18.09
sdb               1.92    24.93   27.32   28.91  3283.12   980.00    75.82     0.21    3.72   3.14  17.67
md1               0.00     0.00    0.11    0.04     0.89     0.35     8.00     0.00    0.00   0.00   0.00
md3               0.00     0.00   11.22   45.41   536.24   855.59    24.58     0.00    0.00   0.00   0.00
md2               0.00     0.00    0.01    3.17     0.08   108.66    34.20     0.00    0.00   0.00   0.00
md0               0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00     0.00     0.00     7.95     0.00    0.00   0.00   0.00

Wich of these drives is underperformimg?

Thanks

 

[cPanelTristan]

Have you checked /var/log/messages and /var/log/dmesg to see if you are showing any drive or other errors there for the server? If one of the drives is failing, it would hopefully show up in one of those locations.

You might also want to run smartctl if you have it installed:

 /usr/sbin/smartctl -q errorsonly -H -l selftest -l error /drivename

Please replace /drivename with the path to the drive.

Thanks!

 

[JC]

Thanks for the tips Tristan.

Turned out to be a bad sata cable that was creating the issue.
The load was due to the raid resyncing.

Replaced and running normaly now

Thanks

 

[audrey]

Hi

the main drive on my dedicated server is spiking a lot
so I ran
/usr/sbin/smartctl -q errorsonly -H -l selftest -l error /dev/sda5
and the server responded
Standard Inquiry (36 bytes) failed [Inappropriate ioctl for device]
Retrying with a 64 byte Standard Inquiry
Standard Inquiry (64 bytes) failed [Inappropriate ioctl for device]

Here is the server information
Linux 2.6.18-308.20.1.el5 #1 SMP Tue Nov 13 10:15:12 EST 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

What command should I use to check the health of the drive?

Thanks in advance for your help

Audrey

 

[talk2prakash]

Try installing hdsentinel

Google gnutoolbox.com +hdsentinel