Fried spot was Re: Smaller model laptops in combination with Kubuntu - request for advise?

[Derek Broughton]

Nigel Ridley wrote:

> So, getting back to your statement about journaling file systems frying a
> specific area (because of the many writes) I am sure that you are correct.
> 
> What is the answer? Journaling file systems are great in what they do, in
> that they recover your data in case of a crash or sudden power outage, but
> frying the hard drive is a serious problem.

It takes more than "one specific area" to be fried on a modern drive (by
which, I think I mean anything manufactured since about 1990).  The drives
automatically remap bad sectors so that the computer (and filesystem)
doesn't even know that a sector was bad.  If you start seeing disk errors,
it means your drive has already run out of automatically remappable
sectors, so it's been bad for a long time already.

That said, _some_ filesystems allow you to specify your own journal file
(ext3, certainly, has iirc an "external journal" which has to be on another
filesystem).  Which means you could create a journal on some currently good
part of the filesystem.  It also means you could schedule rotation of
journals to keep total activity down.

But again, I wonder how necessary a journalling fs is on an Eee or similar?
What does the Eee come preconfigured with? How often does it crash?  I got
in the habit of using a journalling FS years ago, but thinking back, I
don't think I've actually had a situation where I recovered from a journal
more than twice in the past two years.  Both of those situations came about
because of abrupt failures when my laptop battery went dead.  Proper
configuration has solved _that_ issue (though now I get abruptly
hibernated, instead).
-- 
derek