From: stryder@telenet.be.invalid
On Friday 16 November 2012 21:03, unruh conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux.mandriva...
> On 2012-11-16, Adam wrote:
>> unruh wrote:
>>> On 2012-11-16, Adam wrote:
>>>> If you're going to do it again from the command line, I /strongly/
>>>> suggest you do the r/w test as part of mke2fs, before you put
>>>> important data on the drive and while it's still easy to return if
>>>> there are problems with it.
>>>
>>> But I thought that most drives these days did a silent bad-block
>>> remapping anyway. Thus you would not see anything on such a test,
>>> until so many bad blocks had swamped the system that the spare
>>> blocks were all used up. Ie, is there really any point at all in his
>>> huge waste of time?
>>
>> Maybe my thinking is a little old-fashioned, but if there are going
>> to be a significant number of bad blocks, or the drive is going to
>> fail early on ("infant mortality"), I figure it's better that it
>> happen before the user's put any important data on it (and is
>> depending on it) and while the drive is still relatively easy to
>> return or exchange. Also, I don't think it's that much of a "waste of
>> time" because the computer can still be used for everything else
>> during this testing, and TJ mentioned he was doing this on his second
>> computer anyway.
>
> Well, IF my conjecture that bad block remapping is done in
> harware/firmware anyway is correct, then this test will not find any
> anyway.
As I understand it, the process of low-level formatting the drive -
which is done at the factory but can in some cases also be done by the
user via a (disk controller) BIOS utility - already does a bad block
check and remapping, and reserves a certain percentage of the available
disk space as a remapping area. From there on, while in use, the drive
electronics will also detect and silently remap bad blocks.
So far, I have found that with Mandrake (prior to the namechange),
PCLinuxOS and Mageia, the installer allows you to check for bad blocks
but only does this - or so it is my understanding - for the partition
designated as swap. This is not to say that it cannot be done - or
perhaps better worded "that one cannot ordain a bad blocks check" - on
any partition, but the fact that the installer only offers the option of
checking for bad blocks on swap partitions - again, if my understanding
is correct - suggests that it's a pretty futile time waster.
> You might want to do a stress test on the drive to do the same thing--
> ie, fill the drive with some set of bytes, and then read them out, to
> heat it up. Mind you running on usb, that drive can only take about 5W
> anyway, which is not going to heat much of anything up.
>
> Yes, it would be good to find those dud drives early. I am just not
> sure that this will do it. But perhaps someone who knows drives better
> than either of us will chime in.
What I find most disturbing is that people simply buy it when the
percentage of "infant mortality" on any piece of hardware - even non-
computer-related stuff - rises.
Just goes to show that our expectations of the stuff we spend our hard-
earned money on have dropped substantially, and that we're all too
willing to accept that. When consumers don't complain about the drop in
quality, manufacturers won't care to uphold their quality standards
anymore either. The fact that more than 90% of all x86-based
workstations are still running Microsoft Windows despite the fact that
Windows has proven for 25 years to be nothing but utter crap serves to
prove this.
--
= Aragorn =
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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