Corrupted Drive

[Ben Steeves]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 14:48:40 -0500, Henry Hartley
<henryhartley at westat.com> wrote:
> My question...
> 
> Is there something I should be doing to prevent this sort of thing?  On a
> system that doesn't get rebooted very often, should fsck be run manually
> from time to time?  Or would this just cause the same sort of problem?  Any
> suggestions so that I don't have a repeat of this next November would be
> appreciated.

Disks that run continuously for months/years are most likely to fail
when unexpectedly powered down then powered up again.  To prevent a
single disk failure from taking down your server, you should always
run (at a minimum) RAID-1 mirroring on two disks, or better yet,
RAID-10 (i.e., mirrored stripes) over more disks.  If economy of disk
is important, you might consider RAID-5 instead.

If system failures are not considered an option, you might consider a
SAN.  But then you're talking real money.

fsck'ing a filesystem periodically probably isn't necessary; fsck is
meant as a last resort to fix your filesystem when something bad has
happened.  Running fsck on a good filesystem probably wouldn't achieve
much.

-- 
Ben Steeves                     _                    bcs at metacon.ca
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