disk scrubber for Linux?

Bob Bell bbell at macroped.com
Fri Dec 9 09:57:00 EST 2005


On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 09:25:56AM -0500, Paul Lussier wrote:
> Or, how about a hard-drive based archival system designed to *replace
> and obviate* tape backups and slow WORM media?  A previous employer of
> mine sells exactly this type of solution, built on top of Linux, using
> commodity hard drives.
> 
> Despite the fact that the system is designed to replicate each piece
> of data at least once and deposit it elsewhere on the system (where by
> system, I mean a cluster of Linux-based servers), individual
> hard-drive failures are extremely problematic in that if a single
> drive fails, all the data on that drive now needs to be replicated
> throughout the system again to ensure data integrity.
...
> So, mod's request for something which "scrubs" disks in the background
> and re-maps bad blocks on the fly, IMO, is not only a legitimate
> request, but something sorely needed in the Linux space.

I'm not sure who you worked for, but my current employer has a similar
product.  I believe that one of features of the product does include
a daemon (or whatever) that periodically re-reads the objects from disk
in order to detect when a drive or a few blocks on the drive are going
bad.  So at least one (major storage) company has decided that the
feature that mod is looking for is worthwhile.

    -- Bob



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