On Tue, 14 Jan 2014 14:37:46 -0700 Chris Murphy <li...@colorremedies.com> wrote:
> Reserve sectors are fundamental to ECC. If there are no more reserves, the > status should be a failed drive, it can no longer do its own relocation of > data experiencing transient read errors in this case. With the Reallocated sector count being low in that case, I assume the drive *had* a lot of reserve space, but due to a buggy firmware didn't "see the need to use it" just yet for this particular sector. It's not the question of what is "fundamental" or right, I am describing observed behavior in the real world - and yes, of course, that behavior is incorrect and probably an indication of a buggy peculiar firmware. > I'm considering persistent write failure as a result of no more reserve > sectors being available. Write doesn't fail, it succeeds, but you still can't read back the bad block. And the "reallocated sector count" does not increase. > Well, not totally useless, if it flags the user with an hour's notice in > Gnome, If we're again talking the user GUI-level indicators, then an increase in "Reallocated sector count", "Current pending sectors" or "Reported uncorrectable" should also be a reason for such GUI notice to appear. And AFAIK that's how smartd howto/manual recommends configuring it (i.e. an E-Mail on any change in those critical attributes). > >> a way to send a command to the firmware to persistently increase the > >> reserve > >> sectors at the expensive of available space - in effect it reduces the LBA > >> count by e.g. 10MB, thereby increasing the reserve pool by 10MB. > > > > Yes please that, and also a pony. :) > > That seems a lot easier to implement than anything else being discussed. Oh really? Pushing that feature into multiple competing vendor's HDD firmwares across diverse models, product lines, interfaces and revisions is *easier* than mainlining a patch into the Linux kernel?... My point was that this would have been a good feature, but no chance we're going to see it realized. -- With respect, Roman
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