On Fri, 2 Jul 2004 16:22, Michael Loftis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > If you have a hot-spare disk in the machine then you can have it take the > > place of a disk that dies while the machine is running and then replace > > the defective hardware during a scheduled maintenance time. > > Except that in my experience a dead IDE drive takes the whole system with > it even with MD RAID, the system just locks up. (yes even on say three > 'independent' channels).
That hasn't been my experience, maybe I haven't had a drive die in th right way. All the disk failures I have experienced have had read errors be the only symptom. It's expected that a drive electronics failure will take out any other drives on the same cable. If a drive starts drawing excessive current then it can cause the entire system to hang (lack of power for the CPU and other devices), but I wouldn't imagine that to be common. Maybe you encountered a bug in the device driver or the hardware? In either case it would be interesting to repeat the test and file bug reports if it appears to be kernel code. > YMMV of course...I've kind of thought about doing another experiment here > lately I've got a handful of older drives at home that I've thought about > trying failure scenarios (c'mon, don't tell me you're not the least bit > interested in taking a ball peen hammer to a drive in a running system!!!) Good idea! Go for it! Please make sure you have a camera that is capable of at least 2Mp on hand to put pictures of this on your web site! -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
