[vox-tech] fsck, badblocks, defrag, and hd weirdness

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Peter Jay Salzman (p@dirac.org):

> 1. it *appears* that the drive overheated.  i've never heard of drives
>    overheating.  but then again, i'm a hardware enthusiast.  not guru.
>    has anyone heard of non-permanent drive failures due to over heating?

Yes, and:

> 2. if this were your drive, would you replace it?

I'd do the world's hastiest backup, and then replace it.  ;->  You may
have partially fried the electronics on the drive, rendering them
unreliable and/or heat-sensitive.  I've done that, myself, through
bonehead hardware errors about which I can only plead temporary
insanity.

For reasons of market segmentation (and through no fault of the standard
itself), ATA drives tend not to be rated for 24x7 operation, and in
general are just not very rugged.  See:  
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0BRZ/6_23/105884199/p1/article.jhtml
But hey, you get a lot of gigabytes for your dollar.

The 10k RPM SCSI drives I personally favour tend to be fast, noisy,
rugged, and long-lived -- given that I put them in huge-ass cases with
overengineered PC Power and Cooling power supplies.   (But the expense
is irksome.)

> 5. under windows, how is it that programs like scandisk and defrag can
>    do their jobs without either umounting or remounting read-only the
>    partition in question?

I believe it's because there are system-level Win32 semaphores of some
sort that scandisk/defrag monitor to detect any other programs' changes
to the filesystem, whereupon they go back and re-do that portion of the
storage.

-- 
Cheers,             "Don't use Outlook.  Outlook is really just a security
Rick Moen            hole with a small e-mail client attached to it."
rick@linuxmafia.com                        -- Brian Trosko in r.a.sf.w.r-j