Re: failed to read root inode

Emmanuel Florac
2010-05-09T15:32:17Z

Le Sun, 09 May 2010 09:53:55 -0500 vous écriviez:

> Oh, btw, when it comes to SATA drives, there is no difference between
> "desktop" and "enterprise" class drives. They're all the same.

Yes I know that, however there's an important difference : the default
firmware setting of desktop drives makes them retry, retry, retry an
retry on error, effectively freezing the array; while "enterprise
drives" simply fails almost instantly at the slightest error (and work
fine 5 minutes later usually).

So a desktop drive failure in a raid array may actually block all IO
for a very long time (like in minutes), and everything goes west if you
then decide that the system must have crashed and pull the plug, if
your RAID controller hasn't any backup battery.

That's why you shouldn't ever use desktop drives in RAID arrays unless
you know how to painfully configure them, one by one, with a friggin
DOS utility ;)

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