Re: LBA to File?

["Buzbee, James" <James.Buzbee@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stephen Lord wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 16:50, Buzbee, James wrote:
>
> > The scary thing about what we are seeing is that the "grown defect list" 
> > on the disk is showing a lot of sectors in these two areas.  It's almost 
> > as if we are wearing out the sectors in these areas by writing them so 
> > often. Strange but true ;-(
> >
> > Jim
>
>
> Ugh, yes these will be continually written to, the log in particular,
> I like Eric's idea, but the scope of that is fairly drastic and it
> will only postpone the inevitable - you can probably do the math to
> work out how long the drive will run before it runs out of bad
> blocks to remap to. All running with alternating logs would do is
> delay the drive becoming scrap metal. The reliability of these
> devices may not be up to the load you are placing on them.
> Not all ide drives are this bad, I have been running xfs on
> the same ide drive for about 3 years now - but then I am
> not running a PVR. 

Some of these units are never turned off. The user turns off the TV and 
leaves the Set Top box on.  They are running 24/7 recording at least one 
video stream, maybe two.


> I suspect also you may have the write cache
> turned off to avoid errors after a crash.
>  
> Possibly the way your app runs is making things worse. There is a script
> in  the cmd/misc directory called xfsstats.pl you can watch log activity
> with this. In particular xs_log_writes and xs_log_blocks. If log_blocks
> is not a reasonable multiple of log_writes then you are doing a lot of
> very small writes.

Thanks - We'll take a look at it.

Jim




> Steve