Monday, May 18 2015, when I tried to synchronize files between my main computer and my HTPC, I got error messages from Unison telling it was failing for some files. Tired of repeated unexpected failures, I tried copying the files manually. Manual copy was failing too. I quickly noticed that the whole partition I was copying the files to turned into read only. I tried to enable read/write by remounting the partition, that worked, but it reset back to read only after a few minutes. Some Google search later, I was thinking my hard drive was failing. I tried running a self-test using sudo smartctl -t short /dev/sdb and after a few minutes, sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdb. The drive was now failing the short auto-test. Damn, again? Yep, another dead hard drive!

Short term fix

First step was to stop using that beast, so move away all I can before it goes even worse. A failing drive can always become totally unusable, corrupting ALL data on it.

Transfer of my music files from that failing drive (the 1.5Tb one) to another one (the 3Tb one) started to output multiple I/O errors. No, it will fail like this for half of the files and take forever! I aborted that and instead copied my music files from my main PC. At least I would get all the files, not half of them. Fortunately, I was able to transfer most of my ripped DVD and blu-ray disks from my 1.5Tb to my 3Tb drive. I finished the transfer the next day; it ran in the background while I was working from home. I could then unmount the 1.5Tb drive, putting it out of the way for Ubuntu.

I got a new 3Tb drive Friday, May 22 2015 and installed it the morning after. This time, I was able to pick the right drive to remove, because the 1.5Tb was colored green while the 3Tb was red. The new 3Tb is also a red WD model. Unfortunately, things are never smooth when modifying that machine: I had to remove my SSD drive+bracket assembly in order to unscrew the 1.5Tb hard drive. However, after that, I was able to install the new 3Tb drive, put back the SSD assembly and reconnect everything. This went surprising well as opposed to last time where I had trouble finding a way to connect power on the four drives.

The new 3Tb drive seemed to work correctly. I was able to partition it as GPT, create a 3Tb Ext4 partition and mount that partition. I then started a long self-test to make sure it will not fail at me just a couple of days after. The self-test completed during the evening and showed no error.

Tentative prevention

Problem solved? Partly. The thing is that machine runs 24/7 to power a Minecraft server. This makes both hard drives spin non-stop. I would like Ubuntu to stop the drives when they are unused. I moved the Minecraft files to my SSD and will use the hard drives only for media and backup.

No, Ubuntu never ever spins down any hard drive! I tried to set this up with sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdb, no result. Only thing that worked is manually spin down the drive with sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdb (or /dev/sdg for the other drive). I recently found that gnome-disks has an option to set drive spindown timeout. The spindown setting from gnome-disks was honored once on my main computer, but I need to check if it’s reliable or not.

What if it happens again and again?

Otherwise, it seems I need Windows just to get my hard drives automatically spin down when unused, which is quite a shame! I don’t want to format this HTPC as a Windows machine, because the Minecraft server won’t run smoothly on Windows. I will be stuck with an always-open command prompt window with the server running, unless I search forever to figure out a way to run this as a system service, assuming it is possible.

A colleague at my workplace suggested the use of a Ubuntu virtual machine, but my HTPC doesn’t have enough memory to reliably run a VM and I cannot bump it up more than 4Gb because of motherboard limitation. Well, I could try to stick it 4 4Gb DDR2 modules and see, but I’m not sure the board would accept this at all, even though that could fit physically! If that fails, I would be stuck with useless DDR2 while newer systems use DDR3. What a pain!

I also investigated the possibility of using a RAID to improve reliability of storage. If I put a third 3Tb hard drive, I could configure a RAID5 array of total 6Tb, and even increase to 9Tb with a fourth 3Tb hard drive! The RAID5 splits and mirrors the data in such a way that two drives are involved when accessing files, increasing performance. It also makes sure that if one drive fails, ALL the data can be recovered and the array can be rebuilt by simply removing the failed drive and adding a replacement drive.

I was tempted by this, but that would have forced me to purchase two hard drives and another PSU to have more than four SATA power connectors. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend more than 300$ just to get this up and running. Moreover, creating the RAID array would have forced me to move all the files away from my current 3Tb drive to combine it with the two new drives, unless I jumped directly to the 4-drive array.

I will instead wait for that machine to die and next system could be a smaller SSD-only HTPC combined with a NAS offering easier drive installation and replacement. I could purchase a dedicated NAS, or build myself a generic computer configured as a NAS. Fortunately, Ubuntu has facilities to configure software RAID, I checked that recently. I’m not sure about the fake RAID using the motherboard, that may or may not work, that may or may not be better than software RAID.