One of our machines has a drive that is taking some errors.  It completely passes the SMART internal diagnostics but the errors indicate problems finding sector headers which can happen if a machine isn’t shutdown properly say during a power outage it can clobber some sector headers.

     While this can be fixed by a format, this drive is older than dirt (about eight years) so I’ve ordered a replacement.  I am expecting to take this machine down Halloween evening for drive replacement.  This is the only non-RAID drive on the machine but it’s used for booting.  If it fails no data will be lost but the machine will be unable to boot until we replace it.  I have a smaller drive which I could replace it with if the replacement does not arrive on time but I would rather replace it with a fresh drive and one with a larger cache should provide faster boot times.