[ale] disk drive diagnostics nirvana - NOT - I have questions

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

On 10/23/2012 9:17 AM, mike at trausch.us wrote:
> On 10/22/2012 06:12 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
>    
<snip>
>> The first thing I do when I get a new drive is write
>> it with random data then Spinrite it about 6 times to thoroughly burn it
>> in.  I then follow up with one such procedure every 4 - 6 months.
>>      
> Save yourself a lot of time, and instead, use Linux mdraid and a pair of
> drives.  The drives will be scrubbed every week, then, and errors will
> be detected and sent via network very quickly.
>
> You could also use Reed-Solomon error correction layered on top of a
> block device, format that with a filesystem, and then not have to worry
> about it, since errors will then be corrected by the filesystem.  Add a
> cron job to scrub weekly and mail warnings and errors off to you, and
> boom---automatic, provably robust recovery from hard drive failures.
> And it's a lot easier than your manual solution.
>
> 	--- Mike
>
>    
Hi Mike T,

I appreciate the information you've shared here.  I like the idea of 
raid and automation for error detection and recovery.  I hope I can put 
things like this to use at some point.  Unfortunately, I cannot do this 
right now for several reasons.  At the moment, it's way above my skill 
level with Linux.  That's not to say I can't learn.  One of the big 
reasons I'm running Linux is to learn things.  Three of the machines I 
maintain are laptops with only room for one drive.  My Dad's machine is 
a small desktop with no expansion room.  So, I cannot really do raid 
unless I stick it in a NAS and then it would be inaccessible to the 
laptops when they're not on the network.  Finally, I need to run Windows 
much of the time because of the devices I attach to the PC's not 
supported in Linux and the family members I deal with who are familiar 
with Windows.  The other issues is that I don't have a huge budget for 
equipment purchases.

All my own machines are dual boot with Ubuntu, and I often boot into it 
for testing or learning something or, in this case, to run diagnostics 
on hard drives.  I try to keep it set up so I can do most common things, 
including web browsing, creating documents, or email, from either 
system.  This has the advantage that, if one OS crashes, I can reboot 
into the other to do work and troubleshoot.

Thanks again for the info, and I'm certainly keeping an archive of all 
these ALE messages for the time when I might need this or that tidbit of 
info.

Sincerely,

Ron

-- 

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Ron Frazier
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linuxdude AT techstarship.com