On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 9:29 AM Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 2019-03-07, Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I can think of 3 things, but more learned M/L contributors may add to these: > > > > 1. The SATA connection has come loose. With time and movement it can come > > (slightly) adrift. Pushing it back in fully fixes this problem - also see > > No. > > 2 below. > > > > 2. The physical connector's contacts are beginning to oxidise. Reseat the > > SATA cable connectors both on the drive and any ribbons on the MoBo. This > > usualy cleans any oxidisation. > > > > 3. The AHCI driver is deploying energy saving measures (aka. Aggressive Link > > Power Management - ALPM). Check the output of: > > > > cat /sys/class/scsi_host/host*/link_power_management_policy > > > > If it doesn't say 'max_performance' you'll need to revisit your BIOS > > settings > > and also PCIEASPM settings in the kernel. > > > > 4. Finally, there is a chance the PSU is playing up. > > Perhaps it's already been mentioned, but failing RAM can cause all > sorts failures that might appear to be failing disks, failing network > cards, failing video cards whatever. I'd run memtest86 for at least > 12 hours just to make sure... >
Failing RAM or failing power certainly can cause all manner of filesystem and other corruption. I've seen it firsthand and cleaning up from it is a total mess (usually best to restore from backup). I would definitely start with a memory test - if the motherboard is good then you can work outwards from there. >From what I've heard SSDs can have bizarre failure modes since they interpose a logical layer between the physical storage media and the rest of the system. They're doing wear-leveling and so on behind the scenes, which means that if something goes wrong all kinds of bizarre problems can occur. I've also experienced a spinning hard drive exhibit lots of data corruption issues due to a faulty SATA interface (not sure where in the interface it - chipset, port, or cable). ZFS saved me there with detection and resolution of errors, and when I moved the drive to a different HBA it worked fine after a scrub. I'd never seen anything like it before but it really made me appreciate ZFS (btrfs should have also worked) - I don't think mdadm would have had any way to resolve these errors easily, though maybe if I used a hex editor to figure out which drive was the bad one I might have been able to move it, wipe it, then re-add it to the mirror pair and let it rebuild. With ZFS I just got an email complaining about errors from zed and it just kept beating back the hordes until I fixed the connection. I forget if it dropped the drive or not - I didn't have any spares but if I did I suspect it would have swapped it in after enough problems. -- Rich
