Some time back, Blaxton was having trouble with bad blocks on his hard disk. Blaxton wrote (off list, and yes, I did check that he's happy having this sent to the list): > I am using 80 pin IDE Hard drive ( 150GB) , and I think this is the > problem, because IDE is not built for multi user purpose and I using it in > a server ,so I am goimg to change it to SCSI Hard Drive, however even > client machines also have bad blocks. Um. IDE wasn't originally designed for multi-user multi-processing use, it's true. But that mainly means that it took more processor time [1] and only copes with one request at a time (which the kernel can hide). Those are performance details, not reliability problems. SCSI hard drives have traditionally been better constructed, because SCSI drives have been used in situations where they get hammered more and failures are less acceptable. But I doubt that's your problem. As you point out, both SCSI and IDE hard drives go wrong: the real answer is a good backup system. > someone told me , nowadays it is usual having bad blocks. Bad blocks happen, but the drive is supposed to hide them as far as possible. Again, you *might* find SCSI firmware writers take more care to make sure this happens. > And as I understand from your reply , all the scan and badblocks mapping is > done through firmware in IDE hard drives , but what about SCSI ? Should be the same. If you're prepared to accept the cost of SCSI disks, and are worried about reliability, I'd strongly recommend that a RAID 1 setup is more important. (You can do RAID 1 with SCSI or IDE, but the options are slightly different). James. [1] Hey, if it's a single processing, single user system, and the One Program needs something off disk, there's nothing else can happen until that data is retrieved, so why not get the CPU to help? Modern IDE controllers using PCI-style access and DMA don't have this problem. -- Home: james | The sendmail configuration file is one of those @westexe.demon.co.uk | files that looks like someone beat their head on Work: James.Wilkinson | the keyboard. After working with it... I can see @sparex.co.uk | why!
