Re: software RAID

From: Adam Miller
Date: Fri May 20 2005 - 15:55:12 EST


Hi,
Yes, I want to know if the bad sector on disk A will be reallocated when disk B tries to write to disk A.

Adam

On Fri, 20 May 2005, Grzegorz Kulewski wrote:

On Fri, 20 May 2005, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 12:56:13PM -0500, Adam Miller wrote:
We're looking to set up either software RAID 1 or RAID 10 using 2 SATA
disks. If a disk in drive A has a bad sector, can it be setup so that the
array will read the sector from drive B and then have it rewrite the
bad sector on drive A? Please CC me in the response.

If a harddisk has a bad sector that is visible to the user (and hence
not remapped by the drive) then it is time to retire the drive since it
is out of spares and very damaged by that point.

If you have a bad sector, it doesn't go away by writing to it again. On
modern drives, if you see bad sectors the disk is just about dead, and
will probably be seen as such by the raid system which will then stop
using the disk entirely and expect you to replace it ASAP.

What do you mean "see bad sectors"?

Modern drives are trying to relocate sectors that can become bad in short time. But this does not work 100% reliably. And sometimes disk wants to relocate sector but the sector can not be read anymore. If this happens disk will return read error when reading the sector _but_ when you will write it again it will relocate it (with new data). And I think this was the idea behind first post... To allow disk A to relocate not readable sectors with correct data from disk B.


Grzegorz Kulewski

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