In <200004121423.e3CENcN08797@pincoya.inf.utfsm.cl> Horst von Brand (vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl') wrote:
> Ed Carp <erc@pobox.com> said:
> [...]
>> It must be nice to live in such a perfect world where one can replace disks
>> instantly at the first sign of a problem. Why have such badblock code in the
>> kernel in the first place -- just insist that all your users have error-free
>> drives.
>> But out here in the real world we don't have such a luxury. It could be days
>> before a drive can get replaced. In the meantime, we have to make do.
> In my experience, once a drive starts showing errors you don't have
> days. You have a few hours of working time left, if you are lucky a
> day. Then the drive (and the data on it) is gone for good. Given that,
> what they are saying (if harsh) is more than reasonable.
My expirience is SIGNIFICALLY different. Sometimes it's disastrous: new
bad blocks will pop every hour (if not every minute) and ... you still
can use system for relatively long time (when HDD on our old, tired
server started to fail with few new bad blocks per day it still was in
active use for few MONTHS till we were able to replace it). Sometimes
after few days (or even hours) complete crash will follow. And sometimes
you'll get one or two badblocks and it'll be all.
P.S. In country where you can easily find 10-years old XT with 4.77MHz 8086
and 10Mb MFM HDD still in active use (even if you can see menu for Turbo Pascal
on screen when it's showing "white paper" in dviscr :-) it's fairly typical to
use HDD with bad blocks: if you can not afford to replace that XT even with
8-year old 286 (or you can afford more "high-end" 386SX25 but not
486DX2-66 - not such a big difference) it's easily guessable that you have two
choices:
1) you will use that old tired HDD with badblocks till it'll REALLY crash
2) you will not have computer at all
And VERY often you can use old HDD with badblocks for VERY long time (years
even) - quite contrary to what you are saying.
P.P.S. I'm not saying that we should add support for such systems in Linux.
Just to note that "common truth" (If you HDD got few badblocks it'll completely
crash really fast after that) is in fact lie. Probability to get total crash
real soon is far from BOTH 0% and 100% ...
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Apr 15 2000 - 21:00:19 EST