RAID 5 Multiple Hard-drives failure (fwd)

[antonyn at tonyrockyhorror.com]

I sent this email several hours ago and didn't see it appear on the list, 
so if this is a duplicate, my apologies..

Hi Bruno,

On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 07:49:59 -0600,
>  Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Doing a cat of the raw device to /dev/null once in a while will
>> give smartd a chance to report errors.  The drive should even
>> internally remap a certain number of 'soft' errors transparently
>> if it is able to recover the data with retries but again it
>> will only do that if you access the bad spot.
> 
> You should be using long self tests to do surface scans of the disk.

Are you saying Les's idea of catting the raw device to /dev/null is not 
sufficient to do a surface scan test?  If it isn't, what is your 
recommendation?

Thanks,
Tony

>

-- 

A sadist is a masochist who follows the Golden Rule.