Howdy Matt. Just to make it absolutely clear, I appreciate your response. I would be quite lost if it weren't for all of the input.
> Unplugging a drive (actually pulling the cable out) does not simulate a > drive failure, it simulates a drive getting unplugged, which is > something the hardware is not capable of dealing with. > > If your drive were to suffer something more realistic, along the lines > of how you would normally expect a drive to die, then the system should > cope with it a whole lot better. Hmmm... I see what you're saying. But, ok, let me play devil's advocate. What about the times when a drive fails in a way the system didn't expect? What you said was right - most of the time, when a hard drive goes bad, SMART will pick up on it's impending doom long before it's too late - but what about the times when the cause of the problem is larger or more abrupt than that (like tin whiskers causing shorts, or a server room technician yanking the wrong drive)? To imply that OpenSolaris with a RAID-Z array of IDE drives will _only_ protect me from data loss during _specific_ kinds of failures (the one's which OpenSolaris considers "normal") is a pretty big implication... and is certainly a show-stopping one at that. Nobody is going to want to rely on an OS/RAID solution that can only survive certain types of drive failures, while there are others out there that can survive the same and more... But then again, I'm not sure if that's what you meant... is that what you were getting at, or did I misunderstand? > Unfortunately, hard drives don't come with a big button saying "simulate > head crash now" or "make me some bad sectors" so it's going to be > difficult to simulate those failures. lol, if only they did - just having a button to push would make testing these types of things a lot easier. ;) > All I can say is that unplugging a drive yourself will not simulate a > failure, it merely causes the disk to disappear. But isn't that a perfect example of a failure!? One in which the drive just seems to pop out of existence? lol, forgive me if I'm sounding pedantic, but why is there even a distinction between the two? This is starting to sound more and more like a bug... > I hope this has been of some small help, even just to > explain why the system didn't cope as you expected. It has, thank you - I appreciate the response. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
