RE:Re: ide drive dying?

RE:Re: ide drive dying?

[Hell.Surfers]

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Is a drive you cant rely on worth having?



On 	06 Sep 2002 21:31:25 +0100 	Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

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From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: Daniel Egger <degger@fhm.edu>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: ide drive dying?
Date: 06 Sep 2002 21:31:25 +0100
Message-ID: <1031344285.9861.81.camel@irongate.swansea.linux.org.uk>

On Fri, 2002-09-06 at 18:33, Daniel Egger wrote:
> Am Fre, 2002-09-06 um 17.38 schrieb Alan Cox:
> 
> > Get the IBM disk tools, upgrade the firmware and see what the ibm tools
> > have to say. IBM drives have had some problems with spontaneous bad
> > blocks appearing that go away with new firmware and a run of the disk
> > tools.
> 
> The "run of the disk tools" that does away with the badblocks is a
> lowlevel format; a tedious way to spent ones' time on a harddrive
> that will die anyway soon.

For the IBM's it depends what the problem is. Spontaneous bad blocks
appearing during power off appears to be fixed by the firmware update
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Re: RE:Re: ide drive dying?

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 2002-09-06 at 21:40, Hell.Surfers@cwctv.net wrote:
> Is a drive you cant rely on worth having?

Thats up to the owner. There are lots of uses for such drives - /tmp,
swap, in a raid array, etc

Mind you I collect drives that have nice properties like "hangs the
entire scsi bus when inserted into an SCA connector" for testing with

Re: RE:Re: ide drive dying?

[jbradford]

> > Is a drive you cant rely on worth having?
> 
> Thats up to the owner. There are lots of uses for such drives - /tmp,
> swap, in a raid array, etc

..primary Windows partition :-)

Re: ide drive dying?

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

>>>>> "AC" == Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:

AC> Thats up to the owner. There are lots of uses for such drives -
AC> /tmp, swap, in a raid array, etc

Be careful of these even in a RAID array; they will go bad silently.
I had one array (software RAID5, 8 75GXP drives on a 3w6800 in JBOD
mode, one hot spare) that was going fine until one drive died hard,
wouldn't spin up, etc.  I replaced it, but during the RAID resync
three other drives were found to have errors.  The array was trash,
but luckily all drives were dead just at the tail end, so I could copy
the data out during the RAID resync.  Some of the failed drives had
the updated firmware.

3ware has background integrity scans now; I don't know if software
RAID has any equivalent besides an occasional 'dd', but even that's a
good idea.

 - J<

Re: RE:Re: ide drive dying?

[Daniel Egger]

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Am Fre, 2002-09-06 um 23.01 schrieb Alan Cox:

> Thats up to the owner. There are lots of uses for such drives - /tmp,
> swap, in a raid array, etc

Having two of such notorious broken drives in a RAID array is also
not an option in many cases. Mirroring is meant to increase data
security in case a drive fails spontaneously; using particularly bad
drives for that purpose is a way to work against the reason.

> Mind you I collect drives that have nice properties like "hangs the
> entire scsi bus when inserted into an SCA connector" for testing with

You probably should keep a DeathStar as the worst drive ever made.
Heck, if my latest replacement drive from IBM ("serviceable used part")
starts failing again I might as well ship it to you instead of IBM.
 
-- 
Servus,
       Daniel

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Re: Re: ide drive dying?

[DevilKin]

On Friday 06 September 2002 22:40, Hell.Surfers@cwctv.net wrote:
> Is a drive you cant rely on worth having?

Very good question... 

the DFT has finished it's work, and tells me no more bad sectors are 
present... for how long?

To the swap guru's: what does linux do if it attempts to write to swap, and 
gets an error code returned from the ide layer?

DK
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