Re: Are linux-fs's drive-fault-tolerant by concept?

[Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com>]

On Mon, 21 Apr 2003 14:22:01 +0300
Denis Vlasenko <vda@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua> wrote:

> On 21 April 2003 12:35, John Bradford wrote:
> > > > Modern disks generally do this kind of thing themselves.  By the
> > > > time
> > >
> > >                ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > > How many times does Stephan need to say it? 'Generally do'
> > > is not enough, because it means 'sometimes they dont'.
> >
> > OK, _ALL_ modern disks do.
> >
> > Name an IDE or SCSI disk on sale today that doesn't retry on write
> > failiure.  Forget I said 'Generally do'.
> 
> I don't know about drives currently on sale, but I think
> it is possible that some Flash or DRAM-based IDE pseudo-disks
> do not have extensive sector remapping features. They can just
> do ECC thing and error out.

Good example. Very good example, because it shows a possibility that some part
of a "drive" may be technically damaged and have _no_ influence at all on the
rest of the "media".

> [...]
> I prefer a big fat ugly kernel printk (KERN_ERR) across my console
> and all the logs: "ext3fs: write error at sector #NNNN. Marking as bad.
> Your disk may be failing!"

I would favor that, too.

> What's wrong with me?

Maybe you don't own a good color copy station for printing your own money bills
... ;-)

Regards,
Stephan