Re: Proactive Drive Replacement

[Luca Berra <bluca@comedia.it>]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 09:38:17AM +0100, David Greaves wrote:
>The main issue is that the drive being replaced almost certainly has a bad
>block. This block could be recovered from the raid5 set but won't be.
>Worse, the mirror operation may just fail to mirror that block - leaving it
>'random' and thus corrupt the set when replaced.
False,
if SMART reports the drive is failing, it just means the number of
_correctable_ errors got too high, remember that hard drives (*) do use
ECC and autonomously remap bad blocks.
You replace a drive based on smart to prevent it developing bad blocks.

Ignoring the above, your scenario is still impossible, if you tried to
mirror a source drive with a bad block, md will notice and fail the
mirroring process. You will never end up with one drive with a bad block
and the other with uninitialized data.

If what you are really worried about is not bad block, but silent
corruption, you should run a check (see sync_action in
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/md.txt)

L.
(*) note that i don't write 'modern hard drives'.

-- 
Luca Berra -- bluca@comedia.it
         Communication Media & Services S.r.l.
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