[PLUG] Reliable storage on a shoestring

[Russell, Allen]

Recently I thought I had a case of "silent data corruption" on a disk drive.  However, what it really turned out to be was a case of intermittently failing memory.  The apparent result is the same but the cause and treatment are quite different.

http://www.memtest.org/  should be your friend.

Allen

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org
[mailto:plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org]On Behalf Of Elliott Mitchell
Sent: Monday, August 08, 2005 3:04 PM
To: plug at lists.pdxlinux.org
Subject: Re: [PLUG] Reliable storage on a shoestring


>From: Evan Heidtmann <clydefrog at adnap.no-ip.com>
> On Sat, 2005-08-06 at 21:28 -0700, Aaron Burt wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 06, 2005 at 09:11:58PM -0700, Evan Heidtmann wrote:
> > > This leads to a more specific question: in what way are my drives likely
> > > to fail? Will they throw up a red flag saying "I'm dead, replace me", or
> > > will they be less straightforward about it and start flipping bits in my
> > > data? 
> > 
> > Drives almost always fail two ways: slow decay (more and more unreadable
> > sectors) or catastrophic (won't do nuthin'.)  Either way, silent data
> > corruption doesn't happen.
> 
> That's very good to hear. It appears that old drives did silent
> corruption, but new drives don't. All my drives are relatively new, so I
> should be fine there.

No recent drive is ever supposed to fail by returning bad data, by recent
I'd say new within the past 10 years or more than say 100MB. Alan's is
not the only report I've seen of a drive giving back bad data when it was
dead though. So modern drives generally fail by failing to give back
data, but very rarely they fail by giving back garbage.

Manufacturers might claim it never happens, but Alan is reasonably sane
so I tend to believe his report, and I have seen other reports of it
happening (rarely, but they are out there if you look).


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