[Techtalk] Faster badblock scans?

[Julie]

Maria Blackmore wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Julie wrote:
> 
> 
>>Does anyone know of a faster way to scan IDE drives for bad blocks?
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm sorry to say this, but don't bother.  Don't just delete this post as
> being unhelpful, please read it and take note, it really is for your own
> good.

While I appreciate the rant, and could quite easily have written
it myself, I'd still like an answer to my question.

For what it's worth, the drives are still in excellent condition,
with far fewer than 1/100th of 1% of the blocks bad.  Last nights
scan was of 10,000,000 blocks, of which 9 came up bad.  One bad
block in 1,000,000 is hardly proof of pending calamity.  Mostly
the problem is that of the 60,000,000 blocks of IDE drive on this
machine, 40 or 50 of them seem to have gone bad over the past 12
to 18 months.

And while rants are often fun, in the same sense that a train wreck
can be fun to watch, the proof that Linux isn't ready for enterprise
computing is that Linux can't survive having a couple of bad spots
crop up on a large disk array without barfing.  Seeing as the 240GB
on this machine is slowly filling, and I expect to have 1TB on it
before year's end, I'd like to be running an operating system that
can survive the occasional non-recoverable disk error.
-- 
Julianne Frances Haugh             Life is either a daring adventure
txjulie at austin.rr.com                  or nothing at all.
					    -- Helen Keller