On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 05:37:34PM +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
Erik Mouw wrote:
If you have a bad block in your swap partition and the device doesn't report an error about it, no amount of RAID is going to help you against it.
The drive IS reporting read errors in most cases.
"most cases" and "all cases" makes quite a difference.
Actually it *was* reporting *all* read errors. It was an early Maxtor 1GB drive and these have been notoriuosly bad for being problematic *however* they have been frightfully good at accurately reporting exactly what was wrong. In this case I was pretty new to the Linux sysadmin thing and never actually really noticed the disk errors in the syslog and correlated them to the process dying. (it was a fair few years ago now).
I actually have never had an ATA disk develop errors it did not report.
My point remains the same. By putting your swap on a RAID (of any redundant variety) you are increasing the chances of machine survival against disk errors, be they single bit, bad block or dead drive.
Talking of Maxtor drives. I have a unit here with less than 6000 hours on it that has started growing bad sectors at an alarming rate. All accurately reported by SMART mind you (clever little disk), but after running a badblocks -n on it (to really shake them loose) the reallocated sector count has halved! Now how can a drive un-reallocate dud sectors?
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