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

Denis Vlasenko (vda@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua)
Mon, 21 Apr 2003 11:37:00 +0300


On 19 April 2003 21:41, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> Hi,
> Besides the problem that most drive manufacturers now seem to use
> cheese as the data storage surface, I think there are some other
> problems:
>
> 1) I don't trust drive firmware.
> 2) I don't think all drives are set to remap sectors by default.
> 3) I don't believe that all drivers recover neatly from a drive error.
> 4) It is OK saying return the drive and get a new one - but many of
> us can't do this in a commercial environment where the contents of
> the drive are confidential - leading to stacks of dead drives
> (often many inside their now short warranty periods).

And sadly,

2) I don't trust Linux (driver + fs)
will react adequately to disk errors.

Drive failures aren't that frequent, and relevant code paths
doomed to stay rarely tested (unless we put 0.00001% 'faked'
failures there ;)

--
vda
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