On Mon Jan 11, 2010 at 11:00:40AM -0700, Tim Bock wrote:

Hello,

Excluding the obvious multi-disk or bus failures, can anyone describe
what type of disk failure a raid cannot detect/recover from?

I have had two disk failures over the last three months, and in spite of
having a hot spare, manual intervention was required each time to make
the raid usable again.  I'm just not sure if I'm not setting something
up right, or if there is some other issue.

Thanks for any comments or suggestions.

Any failure where the disk doesn't actually return an error (within a
reasonable time).  For example, consumer grade disks often have very
long retry times - this can mean the array in unusable for a long time
until the disk eventually fails the read.

If the disk actually returns an error then, AFAIK, the RAID array should
always be able to recover from it.

Cheers,
    Robin
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