Re: Are linux-fs's drive-fault-tolerant by concept?

[Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com>]

On 19 Apr 2003 16:29:36 +0100
Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

> On Sad, 2003-04-19 at 17:04, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
> > after shooting down one of this bloody cute new very-big-and-poor IDE
> > drives today I wonder whether it would be a good idea to give the linux-fs
> > (namely my preferred reiser and ext2 :-) some fault-tolerance. I remember
> > there have been some discussions along this issue some time ago and I guess
> > remembering that it was decided against because it should be the drivers
> > issue to give the fs a clean space to live, right?
>  
> Sometimes disks just go bang. They seem to do it distressingly more
> often nowdays which (while handy for criminals and pirates) is annoying
> for the rest of us. Putting magic in the file system to handle this is
> hard to do well, and at best you get things like ext2/ext3 have now -
> the ability to recover data in the event of some corruption, unless you
> get into really fancy stff.

Ok, you mean active error-recovery on reading. My basic point is the writing
case. A simple handling of write-errors from the drivers level and a retry to
write on a different location could help a lot I guess.

> Buy IDE disks in pairs use md1, and remember to continually send the
> hosed ones back to the vendor/shop (and if they keep appearing DOA to
> your local trading standards/fair trading type bodies).

Just to give some numbers: from 25 disk I bought during last half year 16 have
gone dead within the first month. This is ridiculous. Of course they are all
returned and guarantee-replaced, but it gets on ones nerves to continously
replace disks, the rate could be lowered if one could use them at least 4
months (or upto a deadline number of bad blocks mapped by the fs - still
guarantee but fewer replacement cycles).

> Perhaps someone should also start a scoreboard for people to report dead
> IDE drives by vendor ;)

I sure have contribution to it.

> Alan

Regards,
Stephan