On 04/04/11 11:32 AM, Chuck Munro wrote:
I'd love to hear what other software RAID users think, especially regarding large-capacity drives. It's rare for a modern drive to hand out bad data without an accompanying error condition (which the md driver should handle), but I have read that uncaught bad data is possible and would not be flagged in RAID arrays which don't use parity calculations.
AFAIK, no standard raid modes verify parity on reads, as this would require reading the whole slice for every random read. Only raid systems like ZFS that use block checksuming can verify data on reads. parity (or mirrors) are verified by doing 'scrubs'
Further, even if a raid DID verify parity/mirroring on reads, this would at best create a nonrecoverable error (bad data on one of the N drives in the slice, no way of knowing which one is the bad one).