On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 09:57:01AM +0200, Luca Berra wrote: > 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. I have and use SMART, and because of my experiences with it I do not trust it :) > 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. This definitely belongs in user-space. But you are right, and I've discussed it with colleagues before as well - it would be a good thing to have such a tool. In root's crontab you could easily just put a 'dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null' and so on for all your drives. No need for kernel extensions here... -- ................................................................ : jakob@unthought.net : And I see the elder races, : :.........................: putrid forms of man : : Jakob Østergaard : See him rise and claim the earth, : : OZ9ABN : his downfall is at hand. : :.........................:............{Konkhra}...............: - 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