This question has been on the tip of my tongue... Thanks for your answer...

Out of curiousity, why do you use /dev/zero? Would dd to /dev/null cause
problems or is /dev/zero required for proper results?

Hi,

/proc/mdstat is to monitor the status of your raid, so when one drive
fails it 
becomes dropped out of the raid-array. Using mdadm you can monitor 
/proc/mdstat and it even can send you a mail when one of your disks fails.
So 
if you really want to scan your disk once a week, why not running 'dd 
if=/dev/mdX of=/dev/zero' ? So every block of every raid-disk should
become 
read and the md-driver should automatically drop a failing disk  out of
the 
raid. 
I guess you could even try to repair a disk when it became dropped out of
the 
raid by running some scripts, but since I never trusted any disk that had 
failed ones, I never worried about it.

Bernd
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