Hi,
Besides the problem that most drive manufacturers now seem to use
cheese as the data storage surface, I think there are some other
problems:
1) I don't trust drive firmware.
2) I don't think all drives are set to remap sectors by default.
3) I don't believe that all drivers recover neatly from a drive error.
4) It is OK saying return the drive and get a new one - but many of
us can't do this in a commercial environment where the contents of
the drive are confidential - leading to stacks of dead drives
(often many inside their now short warranty periods).
To be fair I'm not sure if it is only the drive firmware I don't trust -
it could be the controllers and the IDE drivers as well - I don't know.
While RAID works well for drives that just go pop and die, for drives
with dodgy firmware we just sit there and watch the filesystems decay.
I don't think the kernel can do much about that - but it is a sad state.
I'd find two things useful in this respect:
1) A tool to check the consistency of a RAID - presuming I shut my
RAID down safely I should actually be able to use the redundant
information to test it; this should reveal corruption early.
(Perhaps the kernel could check a few sectors a second in the
background)
2) A disc exerciser - something that I can use to see if this drive,
connected to this controller, on this motherboard on this kernel
actually works and keeps its data safe before I put it into live
service.
Dave (After a few weeks of fighting pissy IDE hard drives)
---------------- Have a happy GNU millennium! ----------------------
/ Dr. David Alan Gilbert | Running GNU/Linux on Alpha,68K| Happy \
\ gro.gilbert @ treblig.org | MIPS,x86,ARM,SPARC,PPC & HPPA | In Hex /
\ _________________________|_____ http://www.treblig.org |_______/
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Apr 23 2003 - 22:00:26 EST