On 3/29/11 10:00 AM, Charles Curley wrote:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2011 12:01:49 +0100
Chris Lee<[email protected]> wrote:
I was just thinking about my virtual tapes and the chances of a
failed sector or two going un-noticed until I needed to restore my
data.
Modern hard drives handle bad sectors for you transparently. They swap
in a spare sector, without notifying you. The only way you will see a
report is if the hard drive runs out of spare sectors. If you see a bad
sector report, you have worse problems than a bad backup. Go buy a
replacement drive immediately.
If you are concerned about the reliability of your hard drives, look
into smartmontools. It uses the drive's firmware to test and collect
data. Unfortunately sometimes the reports can be rather cryptic to the
non-hard-drive-literate.
Or go with ZFS on Solaris or FreeBSD or ... see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Platforms.
See http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/zfs-data-integrity-tested/811
--
---------------
Chris Hoogendyk
-
O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology& Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
<[email protected]>
---------------
Erdös 4
