Below is another paper on drive failure analysis, this one won best
paper at usenix:
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/
index.html
What I found most interesting was the idea that drives don't fail
outright most of the time. They can slow down operations, and
slowly die.
With this behavior in mind, I had an idea for a new feature in ZFS:
If a disk fitness test were available to verify disk read/write and
performance, future drive problems could be avoided.
Some example tests:
- full disk read
- 8kb r/w iops
- 1mb r/w iops
- raw throughput
Since one disk may be different than others, I thought a comparison
between two presumably similar disks would be useful.
The command would be something like:
zpool dft c1t0d0 c1t1d0
Or:
zpool dft all
I think this would be a great feature, as only zfs can do fitness
tests on live running disks behind the scenes.
With the ability to compare individual disk performance, not only
will you find bad disks, it's entirely possible you'll find mis-
configurations (such as bad connections) as well.
And yes, I do know about SMART. SMART can pre-indicate a disk
failure. However, I've run SMART on drives with bearings that were
gravel that passed smart, even though I knew the 10k drive was
running at about 3k rpm due to the bearings.
-----
Gregory Shaw, IT Architect
Phone: (303) 272-8817 (x78817)
ITCTO Group, Sun Microsystems Inc.
500 Eldorado Blvd, UBRM02-157 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
Broomfield, CO 80021 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (home)
"When Microsoft writes an application for Linux, I've Won." - Linus
Torvalds
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