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
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