A recent feature of Linux software RAID is a "write intent bitmap". The purpose of this is that before writing to a section of disk the bitmap is altered to mark it as dirty. Then if the machine experiences a power failure or other catastrophic event then when rebooted it will know that the section referenced by that bit is dirty.
Thus on reboot after a serious failure small amounts of data will be synchronised instead of large amounts. This feature is not currently used by the Debian installer. So if you install to a system with multiple disks in a RAID-1 array (and probably RAID-5 and RAID-6) then every time there is a power failure the disks in the RAID will have to be completely read to ensure that they match. If the mdadm command that was used for the Debian installer had "-b internal" appended then the bitmap feature would be used and recovery from some failure conditions would be much faster. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=462617 I've filed a bug report about this at the above URL, but I'd like some input from the people on this list. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Blog http://www.coker.com.au/sponsorship.html Sponsoring Free Software development -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]