On Saturday 11 February 2012 09:29:38 Craig Sanders wrote:
another annoying cause of disks being kicked from mdadm (and zfs and presumably btrfs arrays too) is disk read timeouts due to the drive sleeping.
Not just sleeping, "consumer" drives apparently try much harder to recover from dodgy sectors, up to 2 minutes for some drives so I'm told. "Enterprise" drives give up much quicker in the assumption that they're in a RAID array. Not surprisingly RAID code tends to not be very tolerant of disks that take so long to respond..
"Enterprise" drives don't normally cost that much more, although looking at the prices right now they are quite a bit more expensive at the moment from at least one of our suppliers. Does anyone know if these timeouts are just a default setting that can be 'tweaked' or is it a function of firmware? James