Is there a drive error "retry" parameter?

[Carlos Knowlton <cknowlton@update.fsix.com>]

I want to understand exactly what is going on in the Software RAID 5 
code when a drive is marked "dirty", and booted from the array.  Based 
on what I've read so far, it seems that this happens any time the RAID 
software runs into a read or write error that might have been corrected 
by fsck (if it had been there first).  Is this true?

Is there a "retry" parameter that can be set in the kernel parameters, 
or else in the code itself to prolong the existence of a drive in an 
array before it is considered dirty? 

If so, I would like to increase it in my environment, because it seems 
like I'm losing drives in my array that are often still quite stable.


Thanks!
Carlos Knowlton