On 04/25/2013 08:31 AM, Elias Persson wrote:
> On 2013-04-24 19:34, Joseph Areeda wrote:
>> Thanks Jeff,
>>
>> This does support my current hypothesis that the SSD I was mounting on /
>> is the most likely culprit.
>>
>> What fun.
>>
>> Joe
>>
>> On 04/24/2013 10:27 AM, Jeff Siddall wrote:
>>> On 04/23/2013 07:20 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>>>>> disk utility show ... SMART [is] fine.
>>>>> >
>>>> SMART "health report" is useless. I had dead disks report "SMART OK"
>>>> and perfectly functional disks report "SMART Failure, replace your
>>>> disk now".
>>>
>>> Agreed.  SMART doesn't diagnose everything.
>>>
>>> On the flaky drive I recently replaced smart extended offline tests
>>> all passed as did the smart health assessment check. Nothing else
>>> wrong either (no pending/offline uncorrectable or CRC errors).  But it
>>> surely was not working well.
>>>
>>> Jeff
>
>
> badblocks might be useful?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badblocks
>
> You'd presumably want the "non-destructive" tests...

smartctl -t long is probably a better option.  If a small number of bad 
blocks are detected they should be swapped out by the drive itself 
meaning they are transparent to the FS.  You won't see any of that with 
badblocks.

Jeff