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

[Denis Vlasenko]

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