Dean S. Messing wrote:
I have also discovered "smartctl" and have read that if the short smartctl tests are run daily and the long test weekly that the chances of being caught "with my pants down" are quite low, even in a two disk RAID-0 config. What is your opinion?
There's a good paper on using smartctl to predict the health of disks, and if you can't find it I probably have a copy somewhere, since I gave a presentation on RAID issues which included it. But the basic premise was that if you see errors of certain types, the drives are likely to fail soon. It did *not* say that absent these warnings the drives were unlikely to fail, un fact most drives which did fail did so without warning. So for about 90% of the failures there is no warning.
I had servers a few years ago, running 6TB/server, on lots of small fast drives, and I concluded that the predictive value of SMART was so small that it didn't justify looking at the reports. Take that as my opinion, assume that drives fail without warning.
I'm getting around to replying to several things you have said in various posts, so that people who are threading answers will be happy...
-- bill davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> CTO TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
