Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 09:29:26 -0500 From: Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net> To: Kirk Strauser <kirk@daycos.com> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The need for initialising disks before use? Message-ID: <20060818142925.GA2463@lor.one-eyed-alien.net> In-Reply-To: <200608180919.04651.kirk@daycos.com> References: <44E47092.7050104@mawer.org> <200608180919.04651.kirk@daycos.com>
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[-- Attachment #1 --] On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 09:19:04AM -0500, Kirk Strauser wrote: > On Thursday 17 August 2006 8:35 am, Antony Mawer wrote: > > > A quick question - is it recommended to initialise disks before using > > them to allow the disks to map out any "bad spots" early on? > > Note: if you once you actually start seeing bad sectors, the drive is almost > dead. A drive can remap a pretty large number internally, but once that > pool is exhausted (and the number of errors is still growing > exponentially), there's not a lot of life left. There are some exceptions to this. The drive can not remap a sector which failes to read. You must perform a write to cause the remap to occur. If you get a hard write failure it's gameover, but read failures aren't necessicary a sign the disk is hopeless. For example, the drive I've had in my laptop for most of the last year developed a three sector[0] error within a week or so of arrival. After dd'ing zeros over the problem sectors the problem sectors I've had no problems. -- Brooks [0] The error occured in one of the worst possible locations and fsck could not complete until I zeroed those locations. That really sucked. [-- Attachment #2 --] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQFE5c7FXY6L6fI4GtQRAhQiAJ9425rk9W3X9PfZDBjeog3SeTatPQCgq0NY n2CNOiF7lUzx2JIl+zRXP4I= =oQNz -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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