Colin Simpson wrote:
Hi,
We had a small server here that was configured with a RAID 1 mirror,
using two IDE disks.
Last week one of the drives failed in this. So we replaced the drive and
set the array to rebuild. The "good" disk then found a bad block and the
mirror failed.
Now I presume that the "good" disk must have had an underlying bad block
in either unallocated space or a file I never access. Now as RAID works
at the block level you only ever see this on an array rebuild when it's
often catastrophic. Is this a bit of a flaw?
I know there is the definite probability of two drives failing within a
short period of time. But this is a bit different as it's the
probability of two drives failing but over a much larger time scale if
one of the flaws is hidden in unallocated space (maybe a dirt particle
finds it's way onto the surface or something). This would make RAID buy
you a lot less in reliability, I'd have thought.
I seem to remember seeing in the log file for a Dell perc something
about scavenging for bad blocks. Do hardware RAID systems have a
mechanism that at times of low activity search the disks for bad blocks
to help guard against this sort of failure (so a disk error is reported
early)?
On Software RAID, I was thinking apart from a three way mirror, which I
don't think is at present supported. Is there any merit in say, cat'ing
the whole disk devices to /dev/null every so often to check that the
whole surface is readable (I presume just reading the raw device won't
upset thing, don't worry I don't plan on trying it on a production
system).
Any thoughts? As I presume people have thought of this before and I must
be missing something.
Yes, this is an important thing to keep on top of, both for hardware
RAID and software RAID. For md:
echo check > /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action
This should be done regularly. I have cron do it once a week.
Check out: http://neil.brown.name/blog/20050727141521-002
Good luck,
Steve
--
______________________________________________________________________
Steve Cousins, Ocean Modeling Group Email: cousins@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Marine Sciences, 452 Aubert Hall http://rocky.umeoce.maine.edu
Univ. of Maine, Orono, ME 04469 Phone: (207) 581-4302
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