On 04/25/2013 12:09 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
You'd presumably want the "non-destructive" tests...
smartctl -t long is probably a better option. If a small number of bad
blocks are detected they should be swapped out by the drive itself
meaning they are transparent to the FS. You won't see any of that with
badblocks.
Jeff
Such blocks swapped out by the hardware controller built into the hard
drive (the controller to which the computer hard drive interface
controller communicates -- e.g., the SATA controller on a motherboard)
might or might not be transparent.
Correct. I didn't mean "transparent" as in no data is lost. I meant
that if the HD controller can't _read_ that block it will substitute a
spare block for future _writes_ to that block so there is no benefit for
the filesystem to mark that block as bad -- even if it was bad at some
point in the past.
Once the controller has run out of spare blocks then running badblocks
might be a beneficial thing, though I would argue the drive is well
along its way to catastrophic failure by that point and it should simply
be replaced.
Jeff
