[CentOS] Re: question about software Raid 1

[Nataraj]

On Sun, 2008-09-21 at 21:01 +0200, Kay Diederichs wrote:
> Nataraj wrote:
> > Does software raid 1 compare checksums or otherwise verify that the same
> > bits are coming from both disks during reads?  What I'm interested in,
> > is whether bit errors that were somehow undetected by the hardware would
> > be detected by the raid 1 software.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Nataraj
> 
> I've been thinking about this as well.
> 
> Fact is that with CentOS-5 kernels (but not with CentOS-4, as this 
> functionality became available in kernel 2.6.17) you could (or rather 
> _should_ regularly)
>     echo check > /sys/block/mdX/md/sync_action
> to check agreement between the two (or more) copies. When this finishes, 
> /sys/block/mdX/md/mismatch_cnt shows you the number of mismatches. You 
> can fix these with
>     echo repair > /sys/block/mdX/md/sync_action
> 
> This applies to at least RAID1 and RAID5.
> At this point the question arises: how does the "repair job" know which 
> copy is the correct one? I have no answer to this question.
> 
> BTW, there is - even with current kernels - no speed gain in using RAID1 
> - see http://kernelnewbies.org/KernelProjects/Raid1ReadBalancing .
> 
> HTH a bit,
> 
> Kay
> 

Hi Kay,

>From reading the following url:
http://linux-raid.osdl.org/index.php/RAID_Administration

my understanding is that if repair detects a read error on one of the
drives, and sucessfully reads the corresponding data from the other
drive, then it will attempt to rewrite those blocks on the drive that
got the read error.  It looks like it may do this even if you only run
check.  I don't think it can repair when there is a data discrepency
without the hardware returning an error.  This is primarily what brings
up my concern over sata drives, because I think the hardware error
detection is inferior to SCSI or SAS drives.

Nataraj