Re: FYI: RAID5 unusably unstable through 2.6.14

[Neil Brown]

On Wednesday January 18, lkml@xxxxxx wrote:
> Helge Hafting wrote:
>  >
>  > As other have showed - "mdadm" can reassemble your
>  > broken raid - and it'll work well in those cases where
>  > the underlying drives indeed are ok.  It will fail
>  > spectacularly if you have a real double fault though,
>  > but then nothing short of raid-6 can save you.
> 
> No, actually there are several things we *could* do,
> if only the will-to-do-so existed.

You not only need the will.  You also need the ability and the time,
and the three must be combined into the one person...

> 
> For example, one bad sector on a drive doesn't mean that
> the entire drive has failed.  It just means that one 512-byte
> chunk of the drive has failed.
> 
> We could rewrite the failed area of the drive, allowing the
> onboard firmware to repair the fault internally, likely by
> remapping physical sectors.  This is nothing unusual, as all
> drives these days ship from the factory with many bad sectors
> that have already been remapped to "fix" them.  One or two
> more in the field is no reason to toss a perfectly good drive.

Very recent 2.6 kernels do exactly this.  They don't drop a drive on a
read error, only on a write error.  On a read error they generate the
data from elsewhere and schedule a write, then a re-read.

NeilBrown
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