From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: berk walker Subject: Re: Linux Software RAID a bit of a weakness? Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 23:10:08 -0500 Message-ID: <45E3AF20.7030303@panix.com> References: <1172258378.21648.51.camel@cowie> <45DF46B7.3040707@maine.edu> <1172406243.3765.29.camel@cowie> <45E1E051.1020908@sauce.co.nz> <72dbd3150702260856p5053d028je85cacffb15a5536@mail.gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <72dbd3150702260856p5053d028je85cacffb15a5536@mail.gmail.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: David Rees Cc: Richard Scobie , Linux RAID Mailing List List-Id: linux-raid.ids David Rees wrote: > On 2/25/07, Richard Scobie wrote: >> Colin Simpson wrote: >> > They therefore do not have the "check" option in the kernel. Is there >> > anything else I can do? Would forcing a resync achieve the same result >> > (or is that down right dangerous as the array is not considered >> > consistent for a while). Any thoughts apart from my one being to >> upgrade >> > them to RH5 when that appears with a probably 2.6.18 kernel (which >> will >> > presumably have "check")? Any thoughts? >> >> You could configure smartd to do regular long selftests, which would >> notify you on failures and allow you to take the drive offline and dd, >> replace etc. > > So what do you do when your drives in your array don't support SMART > self tests for some reason? > > The best solution I have thought of so far is to do a `dd if=/dev/mdX > of=/dev/null` periodically, but this isn't as nice as running a check > in the later kernels as it's not guaranteed to read blocks from all > disks. I guess you could instead do the same thing but with the > underlying disks instead of the raid device, then make sure you watch > the logs for disk read errors. > > -Dave > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > Doing a dd to each drive always seemed to work for me > . b-