Well supported, reliable NICs for Redhat Linux/Fedora?

Lamar Owen lowen at pari.edu
Wed Nov 19 19:55:08 UTC 2003


On Wednesday 19 November 2003 02:28 pm, dsavage at peaknet.net wrote:
> AFAIK, SCSI is still the only hard drive interface that supports low level
> formatting. I can't tell you the number of IDE/EIDE hard drives I've had
> to throw away over the years because power failures during write ops that
> corrupt sector headers. Some later model EIDE drives can map those "bad"
> spots away, but only SCSI allows you to repair that damage by laying down
> new sectors, headers, gaps, etc.

Toshiba, Fujitsu, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, et al, provide low level 
format utilities that will do exactly what you want.  I have a Maxtor/Quantum 
(Maxtor bought out Quantum, and low end Maxtors might be relabeled Quantums) 
60GB drive that had that problem.  Using the Maxtor low leveller fixed it 
right up.  This drive had been in a drive sled that had power connector 
issues; it was spinning up and down every few seconds.

As to losing data through power corruptions, if your SCSI drive is in the 
middle of a write, and power fails in such a way that writing current is 
still on as the head goes over embedded servo data (as all currently 
available drives use), then it's going to be unusable just like the IDE 
drive, because a servowriter must be used to get that data back, regardless 
of drive interface type.

As to the use of 'is still the only,' ESDI and MFM drives historically did low 
level formats.  IDE is just the MFM/RLL/ESDI controller wrapped up onto the 
drive electronics board, and many older IDE drives support the same low level 
command.  Zone Bit Recording drives, OTOH, have to have a special program to 
do the job, or, in the case of Conner drives, a special hardware fixture was 
used, and Conner drives of that vintage truly cannot be software low 
levelled.  But, then again, just because you issue the format unit command to 
a SCSI drive does not mean that drive has to honor it.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu





More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list