Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 05 Jul 2001 11:08:12 -0400
From:      Bill Moran <wmoran@iowna.com>
To:        Dale Hagglund <rdh@best.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, dnelson@emsphone.com
Subject:   Re: SCSI bad block remapping
Message-ID:  <3B4482DC.C3CF1B6C@iowna.com>
References:  <3B327713.46173EC5@iowna.com> <863d8curun.fsf@ponoka.battleriver.com> <20010704205514.A13653@dan.emsphone.com> <86pubfubp7.fsf@ponoka.battleriver.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Dale Hagglund wrote:
> 
> Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com> writes:
> 
> > In the last episode (Jul 04), Dale Hagglund said:
> 
> > >         (a) the disk might do remapping in fairly large chunks, even
> > >         up to a track in size, and
> 
> > ... The couple drives I've looked at map single blocks. ...
> 
> > >         (b) after remapping, the data in the remapped region is
> > >         undefined.
> 
> > I am extremely skeptical of this.  If the data can be remapped, it
> > is remapped correctly (that's what all the ECC stuff is for).  If it
> > cannot be remapped, an error is returned.
> 
> Since this piqued my interest, I tracked down the horse's mouth.
> According to the the SCSI-3 Block Commands specification, when a
> REASSIGN BLOCKS command is issued the data contained in blocks being
> remapped may be modified.  Also, the command can fail because it needs
> to remap a larger region than the one specified.  However, from the
> documentation of AWRE and ARRE, it appears that blocks are reassigned
> automatically only if the drive firmware can recover the data.
> 
> It looks like the upshot is that you can, as you suggested, turn on
> automatic sector remapping without fear of silent data loss.

This is good to know. Thank you for taking the time to look into the
specs for us, Dan.
Now that I know that it is safe to turn on sector remapping, I still
don't know _how_ to do it.
I'm also still curious about what's going on with a drive that crashes
because of bad sectors one day, and then (once reformatted) runs
with no problems for over a week (and still running ...)

Thanks so far,
Bill

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3B4482DC.C3CF1B6C>