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Under what circumstances would turning off the power cause
a disk to develop a pair of adjacent unreadable blocks?
Or do you think they were already there and the reboot just
revealed them?

Background...

We have 4 MAXTOR Atlas 10K V 147GB drives in a JBOD
attached to a SunFire V880 through a Sun Dual Ultra
320 SCSI controller. It has run for half a year with no
disk errors logged by Solaris. A few weeks ago I shut
the system down with:

/usr/sbin/shutdown -g 0 -y -s 5

The V880 powered itself off. I then pulled the 3 power cords
from the power supplies on the back, then turned off the
two power supplies on the JBOD.

Later when power was reapplied (in the opposite order) the system came
up and there were 2 adjacent unreadable bad blocks on one of these
drives. These were eventually forced to remap by:

format -> analyze -> read

on that disk. Since then no other bad blocks have appeared.

Now as I understand it when power is removed from modern hard drives the
heads automatically snap back to some position where they can't damage
the data. It looks like here there may have been a bit of contact
between the heads and one platter on the way back to this position. The
blocks in question live in the middle of an index table from a large
Oracle database and I'm guessing that Oracle probably would have noticed
them before this. But maybe not, they could have been latent for a
while and were only revealed when the system was rebooted and Oracle
went through some sort of start up verification phase and found them.

Anybody want to rate the relative likelihood of these two scenarios?

Thanks,

David Mathog

David Mathog wrote:
> Under what circumstances would turning off the power cause
> a disk to develop a pair of adjacent unreadable blocks?
> Or do you think they were already there and the reboot just
> revealed them?
>

Bad blocks can sit unnoticed for a long period of time. You
didn't do anything wrong. I work in a lab with ~300 various
machines on a UPS. Usually the UNIX machines will be up
and running for over a year, even years. Whenever we do a
power shutdown, we loose 5-10 drives no matter how we
shut the machines down.