Re: Journaling pointless with today's hard disks?

Jeff V. Merkey
2001-12-01T10:51:33Z

Check out the hotfixing code in NWFS. It handles exactly what this
long and drawn out thread has discussed, and it's already in
Linux. The code is contained in nwvp.c. I can tell you
that in the past three years of running NWFS on Linux and all
the time I worked at Novell from about 1996 on, I never once saw
a server hotfix data after the newer "data guard" drive technologies
came out. In fact, by default, I make the hotfix area on the drive
about .1 % of the total space, since it;s probably just wasted
space at this point.

It's just wasted space these days, but it is a good idea to keep it
around, just in case the "pointless" argument turns out not to
be pointless and someone gets eaten by a shark (1 in 100,000,000) at
the same instant they are struck by lightening (1 in 200,000,000).

:-)
Jeff

On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 11:21:57PM +0100, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
>
> > > Assuming the drive's inherent bad-block detection mechanisms don't find it
> > > and remap it on a read first, rapidly consuming the spare block reserve. But
> > > that's a firmware problem...
> >
> > Drives should never reassign blocks on read operations, because they'd
> > take away the chance to try to read that block for say four hours.
>
> Why not? If drive gets ECC-correctable read error, it seems to me like
> good time to reassign.
> Pavel
> --
> "I do not steal MS software. It is not worth it."
> -- Pavel Kankovsky
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