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

[John Bradford]

> > > > > > I wonder whether it would be a good idea to give the linux-fs
> > > > > > (namely my preferred reiser and ext2 :-) some
> > > > > > fault-tolerance.
> >
> > I'm not against this in principle, but in practise it is almost
> > useless. Modern disk drives do bad sector remapping at write time, so
> > unless something is terribly wrong you will never see a write error
> > (which is exactly the time that the filesystem could do such
> > remapping).  Normally, you will only see an error like this at read
> > time, at which point it is too late to fix.
> 
> It is *not* useless.
> 
> I have at least 4 disks with some bad sectors. Know what?
> They are still in use in a school lab and as 'big diskettes'
> (transferring movies etc). I refuse to dump them just because
> 'todays disks are cheap'. I don't want my fs to die just because
> these disks develop (ohhhh) a single new bad sector.

Read my previous posts.

A layer between device and filesystem can solve this.  It doesn't
belong in the filesystem.

John.