Correctness
Correctness
Posted Dec 11, 2008 16:50 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547)In reply to: Correctness by ncm
Parent article: Tux3: the other next-generation filesystem
A disk will happily write half a sector and scribble trash. Most times reading that sector will report a failure, but you only get reasonable odds.Given that disk drives do their own checksumming, you get pretty good odds. And if you think they are not good, why would you think that FS checksums are any better?
Concerning getting such damage on power-off, most drives don't do that; we would hear a lot about drive-level read errors after turning off computers if that was a general characteristic. However, I have seen such things a few times, and it typically leads to me avoiding the brand of the drive for a long time (i.e., no Hitachi drives for me, even though they were still IBM when it happened, and no Maxtor, either; hmm, could it be that selling such drives leads to having to sell the division/company soon after?); they usually did not happen happen on an ordinary power-off, but in some unusual situations that might result in funny power characteristics (that's still no excuse to corrupt the disk).