David C. Rankin wrote:
Simply put, if small disk errors go uncorrected in the dmraid array and are allowed to remain uncorrected and multiply, then dmraid has a gaping hole in its robustness making it look far inferior to software raid.
Surely you can still use SMART to monitor the drives, right?
Does anybody know more or have any links to detailed information on how bad blocks are handled in dmraid??
It's done automagically by the IDE drive.
All of this discussion is prompted by 2 recent supposed disk 'failures' in dmraid setups where one disk will be pristine, but the other will have hundreds of simply corrected errors that have never been fixed over the life of the array, that after disabling the array and running e2fsck are fully correctable.
If I understand this right, you have a two-disk RAID1 array run by a hardware/on-board controller that you access via dmraid. Unless something is wrong with the mirroring, I don't see how one disk can have file-system errors that the other does not.
In all the dmraid documentation I have read, I have never seen a warning or note that says:
"Periodic disabling of the dmraid array will be required to allow fsck or other disk maintenance processes to be run on the individual disks of the array because enabling dmraid in the BIOS prevents disk maintenance on individual disks in the array."
I'm concerned that something like that is needed. The question is, "Is that true?"
Unless your RAID setup also prevents SMART monitoring, no. /Per -- Per Jessen, Zürich (-0.8°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org