On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 10:20:53PM +0200, Jakob Østergaard wrote: > What often happens (in my experience) is, that a number of disks build up bad > blocks. One day, you hit one of those bad blocks, and that one disk is kicked > from the array. > > When you re-sync, you *will* hit the remaining bad blocks on the other disks, > causing the array to fail completely. > > Using hot-spares will "automate" this failure - meaning that an administrator > may not be anywhere near the system when this total failure happens. > > Not using hot-spares is less "automatic" in the lucky case where everything > works, but it also assures that an administrator actually is near the system > when the total failure is likely to occur. well, what we could do to prevent this. if you don't have or trust S.M.A.R.T. is having a 'consistency check' function in md, that would read from all disks and even compare data or calculate parity for raid5, it could be scheduled to run periodically with a very very low priority. L. -- Luca Berra -- bluca@comedia.it Communication Media & Services S.r.l. /"\ \ / ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN X AGAINST HTML MAIL / \ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html