This is just trying to read 5GB off the drive with dd and the drive initially tested ok but shortly after I wondered why I was seeing 2MB/s read speeds. Notice the "current_pending_sector", anytime I've seen it at anything above 0 even with no other bad fields/attributes, it means the drive is bad.
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x3 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
ata1.00: cmd 60/00:00:........
I like dd, although it only reads it, usually a read test of the entire disk will uncover if your hard drive is bad in some parts. This is a good thing to do at least once a month, a lot of times bizarre program behavior, laginess and crashing/unnmounting problems etc.. are due to a failing disc and SMART won't know it or indicate a problem:
We must also remember there's never a guarantee, I've found that ever since we moved to larger and more platters per drive with 1TB drives........
I had a dying drive that smart thought until it totally disappeared was a good drive, and actually all parameters did look fine but this system was causing my system to lockup and other bad behavior:
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0
Serial Number: WD-WMAZ20139
Firmware Version: 50.0AB50
User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes
Device........
Let the numbers speak for themselves, from what I read the Load_Cycle_Count which is very high (more than 500,000/half a million times) is the number of head parks. What a stupid"Green" design and design flaw which will probably mean an early life for the drive.
This is almost as silly as Seagate's new reputation for BSY/poor quality disks since the 7200.11 series.
To make it worse this is also when Western Digital introduced "Advanced Format" o........