On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 10:17 PM, Tony Nelson <tonynelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Palimpsest is worse than that. It claims a disk that has any > *reallocated* sectors is bad. That's just wrong. The most one could claim is that a drive with no remapped sectors was in some way better than one with, but disk drives have supported sector remapping since the beginning of time. The very first hard drive I ever owned was a 135 MB (MegaBytes, not GigaBytes!) full-height 5 1/4" Fujitsu SCSI-1 drive that I put in a "shoebox" case. It came with a hardcopy listing of the bad sectors. My business partner was completely outraged! "How could they sell us a drive with sectors that they know are bad?" An alternative to remapping, which is support by most filesystems, is not to remap at all, but to mark filesystem blocks that contain one or more bad sectors as unusable. More or less, when the filesystem is laid down, a small invisible file will be laid over each bad sector. Remapping preserves the total number of sectors on the drive, but marking bad sectors as simply unusable avoids the problem of ever running out of spare sectors, at the cost of losing some of the drive's total capacity. Don Quixote -- Don Quixote de la Mancha quixote@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.dulcineatech.com Dulcinea Technologies Corporation: Software of Elegance and Beauty. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
