On 02/05/2011 08:28 PM, compdoc wrote: >> One of these drives had a faulty block which the drive had not been able > to automatically relocate. > > > Just curious, what's the reallocated sector count for the drive? And how > many bad sectors do you feel comfortable with? > > I used to live with drives with a low reallocated sector count, but I > recently noticed a problem: when a drive develops a new bad sector it can > cause one of two things to happen to a server: > > 1) if the drive is part of a 3ware raid5 array, it is dropped by the > controller, causing a degraded array. > > 2) if the drive is connected directly to the motherboard's onboard sata > ports, it causes the system to hang for a period of time. Completely > unresponsive. > > > So now I change the drive if a drive's reallocated sector count is greater > than zero. > > By the way, I hear the WD green drives spin down after a period of time with > no access. Is this a problem for you? > > > > > > > The Reallocated_Event_Count is now 0 ... I suspect that the drive managed to write over the duff sector. When I wrote over the sector with dd the Current_Pending_Sector went down to 0 and short tests returned no errors but the Offline_Uncorrectable and Multi_Zone_Error_Rate when up to 1. After some time (10 hours ?), the drive has reset the Offline_Uncorrectable and Multi_Zone_Error_Rate values to 0. As to how many I feel comfortable with, 0 ... I haven't had any known hard bad sectors on disks for a number of years now, but just had a spate with WD20EARS drives. One relatively new one (3 months) reported 17 bad sectors all in a row. This sounded like a head crash to me so I asked Western Digital and they replaced the drive. The new one had this single bad sector after copying on 1.5T of data and I thought it was worth fixing this one. The drive is going to be used as a non powered backup drive for my MythTv video archive and won't be backing up any important data. Yes, the WD green drives remove the heads and I think lower spin speed after a time. They cannot be used in RAID arrays, at least if you want more than a few megabytes/sec out of them. Been there, done that. You have to make sure the drives are rated as suitable for RAID to use them reliably under raid. There are features needed such a TLER (time limited error recovery). Modern desktop drives have many optimisation and other features such as spinning faster/slower, removing heads, and trying for long times to recover data from duff sectors. The TLER issue will cause the problems you mentioned. With a RAID drive it should should only try for a short time to recover a duff sector, if it takes to long the OS will assume the drive is dead and take it out of the array. The OS is happy for it to return the fact that the sector is duff as it may be able to work around this. With a RAID array the OS can re-write the block as it knows the data from the other drive/drives. The drives own recovery system will get in the way. At work we only use RAID rated drives. At home I have used normal drives in the past. I did try to use some Green drives in a RAID array, on my home server to lower power usage and it caused no end of problems. The main one being performance. The data access speed would drop from around 90 MBytes/sec to around 5MBytes per second and stay there. I'm not sure what was happening, but I suspect interaction between the Linux kernel and the two Green drives as they sped up and down or changed the kernels block ordering to its own scheme causing interaction problems. Not sure what, but after reading about TLER and trying to sort out my performance issues, I will always make sure the drives are rated for RAID now ... Terry -- 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
