regular fsck runs are too disturbing - and current approach does not work very well in detecting defects!

[Jan Claeys]

Op dinsdag 02-10-2007 om 13:56 uur [tijdzone -0400], schreef Phillip
Susi:
> Jan Claeys wrote:
> > I'm not an Ubuntu developer, but if 'badblocks' looks for hardware
> > defects, it's mostly useless on most hard disks in use these days.  The
> > HDD firmware does internal bad block detection & replacement (using
> > spare blocks on the disk reserved for that purpose).  So if you can
> > detect any bad blocks using a software check, it means that your hard
> > disk is almost dead and should be replace ASAP (like, rather today than
> > tomorrow).
> 
> It can only remap the block on a write, not a read,

Which means it might be useful as an emergency solution while you're
waiting for the new disks to arrive.

> but yea, smartmontools is a better method to monitor for defects.

Indeed, 'smartmontools' for hardware-defects, "fsck" for
filesystem-defects.


About doing "live" fsck & defrag on a rw filesystem, IIRC Windows NT has
a system API for doing e.g. atomic "swap 2 sectors" operations; does
'linux', or any of the filesystem drivers for it, support something like
that?


-- 
Jan Claeys