Last week I released the blog post I mentioned previously. It’s now in Finnish and English.
I have an old netbook from 2011 that I have used as my home server since 2017. It has a 1 TB SSD, and for some time it had weird problems such as “Remounting filesystem read-only” and “EXT4-fs error”, usually leading to crashes. After rebooting, Ubuntu’s boot screen would not always appear. According to SMART, the drive was however all fine. At first I replaced the file system’s journal and ran fsck. That wasn’t enough, and the problems persisted. I was about to RMA the SSD, when I put Gparted Live on an USB stick and used that for fixing the file system. And it worked, now the home server has worked all fine for over three days!
SMART can be used for a couple different things - one is just reading the health values reported by the drive, another is for instructing the drive to run tests of itself and then reporting the results. if you haven’t already, I’d recommend having it run the “long” self-test as that inspects the entire drive. it will often prompt the drive to report problems that it may not have noticed otherwise.
a related thing to keep an eye on, especially with an old netbook like that, is the power & data connectors to the drive. buildup of dust, or corrosion on the contacts, or something like that, could cause symptoms that look like a drive failure, even if the drive itself is perfectly healthy.
The problems I described eventually happened again after 3 days or so. I got pissed, so I decided to RMA the drive and ship it to Denmark where the store I bought it from has its HQ. As a temporary solution I formatted the laptop’s original HDD, put it back and installed Ubuntu Server. A bit of setting up and now things work. In the meantime I won’t be running NextCloud though, as the drive’s only 250 GB.
Two thoughts in case unexplicable stuff happens again:
SMART doesn’t detect all possible errors, especially not on SSDs. (It was originally designed as an early-warning system for mechanical failures on spinning rust drives, and later somewhat expanded.)
A faulty RAM chip can cause all sorts of subtle (and not-so-subtle) mayhem but is often overlooked as a possible cause for disk troubles. If in doubt, MemTest86 is your friend!
Last week I released the blog post I mentioned previously. It’s now in Finnish and English.
I have an old netbook from 2011 that I have used as my home server since 2017. It has a 1 TB SSD, and for some time it had weird problems such as “Remounting filesystem read-only” and “EXT4-fs error”, usually leading to crashes. After rebooting, Ubuntu’s boot screen would not always appear. According to SMART, the drive was however all fine. At first I replaced the file system’s journal and ran fsck. That wasn’t enough, and the problems persisted. I was about to RMA the SSD, when I put Gparted Live on an USB stick and used that for fixing the file system. And it worked, now the home server has worked all fine for over three days!
SMART can be used for a couple different things - one is just reading the health values reported by the drive, another is for instructing the drive to run tests of itself and then reporting the results. if you haven’t already, I’d recommend having it run the “long” self-test as that inspects the entire drive. it will often prompt the drive to report problems that it may not have noticed otherwise.
a related thing to keep an eye on, especially with an old netbook like that, is the power & data connectors to the drive. buildup of dust, or corrosion on the contacts, or something like that, could cause symptoms that look like a drive failure, even if the drive itself is perfectly healthy.
The problems I described eventually happened again after 3 days or so. I got pissed, so I decided to RMA the drive and ship it to Denmark where the store I bought it from has its HQ. As a temporary solution I formatted the laptop’s original HDD, put it back and installed Ubuntu Server. A bit of setting up and now things work. In the meantime I won’t be running NextCloud though, as the drive’s only 250 GB.
Two thoughts in case unexplicable stuff happens again:
I even ran MemTest86 and it showed things to be all fine. I recently bought new memory (2 GB) for the netbook.