[Techtalk] Faster badblock scans?

[Hamster]

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 09:48:51 -0500
Julie <txjulie at austin.rr.com> wrote:

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


First off, I'd like to say thanks to Maria for taking the time to write the
really long reply she did. I thought it really informative.

My thoughts on the matter are this:

If it has to test each block, one at a time, then the fastest it can do this
is limited by the specs of the actual drive, no? In which maybe hdparm can
do something to up the ante a little. If you're looking for the ability to
perhaps run multiple heads simultaneously, thats beyond me, I have no idea
if that's possible. 

 
> 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.

I guess I don't call such a deterioration "good condition". While taken in
isolation the numbers dont point to a pending death, but when you add "gone
bad over the last 12 to 18 months" that puts a red flag up as far as I'm
concerned.

> 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.  

Then dont use it! Switch to another OS. My experience with linux and
harddrives has been the exact opposite. I've used linux to recover stuff on
drives that other OSes have reported unreadable. It's enterprise ready in
my mind. Did you say which kernel you were using? 

Just my few thoughts.

Hamster