disk scrubber for Linux?

[Ben Scott]

On 12/8/05, Michael ODonnell <michael.odonnell at comcast.net> wrote:
>... please allow me to continue to at least suggest the
> laughable possibility that periodic reads of disk blocks to
> verify their integrity isn't a total waste of time ...

  It certainly seems like it *could* be worthwhile, and I doubt it
would hurt.  I do think John Abreau's point, that such files should
get read anyway, and regularly, as part of backups, is a good one. 
But I also envision situations that don't work that way -- in
particular, quiescent data which is backed up once, and then excluded
from regular backups.

  So.  How about:

while true ; do nice 19 dd if=/dev/foo of=/dev/null ; done

  Of course, that depends on Linux kernel scheduling to make sure it
really does get background priority.  I dunno how well that works in
practice.

-- Ben