On 5 May 2005, at 01:57, Charles Swiger wrote:

> On May 4, 2005, at 11:20 AM, Stephen Borrill wrote:
>> Got a RAID 1 set of identical Maxtor 6Y080M0 80GB S-ATA drives. One 
>> seems to have developed a bad sector or two:
>>
>> wd2a: error reading fsbn 845648 of 845648-845663 (wd2 bn 847664; cn 
>> 840 tn 14 sn 62)wd2: (uncorrectable data error)
>> [ ... ]
>> Is there any way to mark bad sectors in the underlying components so 
>> that RAIDframe will ignore them? Is doing such a thing a sensible 
>> move? bad144/badsect don't seem appropriate.
>
> No, it's not a sensible move.  Modern ATA drives already use ECC and 
> migrate bad sectors to the spare sectors automaticly.  You don't see 
> errors until the drive has had so many bad sectors appear that it has 
> used up all of the replacement spare sectors.

install pkgsrc/smartmontools to have the drive monitored more closely 
and give you some warning first - afaik there is no other way that dead 
sectors are reported apart from unrecoverable error as Charles 
suggested ... smartd tells you all sorts of good stuff about the life 
of your disks ...

speaking of RAIDFrame, I recently came across the message from it to 
the effect

help!  emergency full-stripe buffers depleted

... not sure what that means ... anyone?

-- 
Malcolm Herbert
Computer Support Officer
School of Geosciences
Monash University
ph 9905 4881