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If we all had ECC on our machines then SW engineers would have one less of an excuse to blame it on HW. Power-cycle related story: my machine crashed two weeks
by crististm 11y ago
If we all had ECC on our machines then SW engineers would have one less of an excuse to blame it on HW.
Power-cycle related story: my machine crashed two weeks ago while playing a movie and my 3TB hdd showed only 2TB on _SMART_ after power reboot! After googling around, letting the hdd cool off and playing with wd tools, several power reboots later my 3TB partition is back but not without loosing a couple of MB of the size of the disk at the end of it. Puff, just gone, not deleted, gone! My old partition is now bigger than the 3TB drive.
Smart reports a 3TB disk again, and I'm on the look for a spare drive.
No, really, not all power cycles are equal.
- falcolas 11y agoThis comment has two parts - the first one I think deserves more attention. When your program can actively and randomly rot while it's in in production, the only valid recovery method really is "power cycling" the application. As the OS is also being affected by this rot, power cycling the OS is a valid solution to many problems as well. The push for making broad use of consumer hardware running production environments to save (a veritable fistfull of) money has only made this problem worse. It makes me wonder if we shouldn't be adding a module to the Linux kernel to occasionally reload blocks of code from disk.
- crististm 11y ago"occasionally reload blocks of code from disk" - It's not that simple. An ECC system avoids most HW related issues but does not protect you from SW errors which probably accounts for most rotting. Why reboot it in the first place? If the HW has ECC, the SW does not rot unless it is poorly written.