der Mouse writes:

>Interesting how different people (or should I say "environments"?) are.
>Just about the last thing I want is for the system to hide hardware
>failures.  If your disk had died permanently, you might well have had
>no idea anything was wrong until a week later, and thus lost a week of
>writes for lack of anywhere to flush them to.

Well, it was obious from the performance that not all was as it should
be.  Also the kernel did log the warnings.

-- 
  Matthias Buelow;  mkb@{mukappabeta.de,informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de}