Sometimes users take their removal drives and unplug and replug them to test what happens during the failure of a disk. However, this breaks things quite badly due to the /dev/mapper in LUKS not coming back online due to it not being closed.
In other words, generally with non-encrypted drives the process is smooth but when encrypted you may want to follow a strategy like this:
We can see below that both disks are unavailable as they were physically remov........
Here's a proven example of what a bad hard drive can do, it was technically functioning OKin a RAID array but the system became extremely low and the load become high and IOWAIT was even higher and I always thought it was a bad application. The truth is that this failing 1TBHitachi has slowly gotten worse and caused huge slowdowns, (eg. 100% load on Thunderbird waiting for e-mails to load etc..). After swapping it out, tabs change instantly, emails are not lagged, and........
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........
I had one of these shipped and it was not recognized when plugged in, here's what a dead drive looks like (I assume it's teh circuit board which is dead):
ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
ata1: softreset failed (device not ready)
ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
ata1: link online but device misclassified, retrying
ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
ata1: softreset f........