[plug] re: RAID5 & Hot Spares

[Denis Brown]

At 14:45 12/06/2003 +0800, Craig wrote in part:

<snip interesting stuff>

400 + bad sectors, and almost totally unuseable. When I ran a disk test, it 
started with 400-ish bad sectors and finished with 440 (according to 
SMART). Clearly, the SMART monitoring and drive testing doesn't work as 
well as it should - but there's no user monitoring facility. In retrospect, 
I think I would've gone for software RAID and saved $1200.

Implying that software RAID has advantages?   I hope so because that is 
what I need to use (for cost reasons) at the moment.   I'll hunt around for 
a SMART daemon - would be nice if warnings of bad sectors could be 
automatically e-mailed to the admin!   Hmmm... need to look into admin & 
reporting tools a bit more :-(

Cheers,
Denis