Posts Tagged ‘ disks ’

How to change a disk “type” in Solaris.

January 7, 2010
By gary

Sometimes you might want to change the “type” of a disk within Solaris. The “type” of the disk is stored on the disk itself, along with the partition table (presumably in the VTOC in the first part of the disk). For the purpose of this post, I use disk “name” and “type” interchangeably. In...
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Hardware design for high density storage pod

September 9, 2009
By gary

These guys at ‘backblaze’ claim to be able to provide 67TB for $7,867 based on 45 SATA drives, RAID6 (Linux) and JFS. The hardware design which is presented in the blog as a how-to uses vertically stacked drives and looks very much like the Sun ‘Thumper’ (X4500) device which I first saw...
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Details on Disk Drive failure modes.

May 26, 2009
By gary

This detailed paper “Hard disk drives, the good, the bad and the ugly” describes the many failure modes of modern disk drives. Jon Elerath outlines the many causes of silent data corruption, and the steps taken by HDD manufacturers to recover from transient errors. This is interesting from a performance perspective since...
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Finding data corruption with ‘od’

September 4, 2008
By gary

Here’s a weird one that I’d never seen before. We were finding that at least one of our linux binaries was becoming corrupt (verified using rpm -V) however we didn’t know how the binary was becoming corrupt – because these files should never be written to. On the off-chance that the corruption might...
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Change disks used by an aggregate

June 27, 2008
By gary

Recently we needed to transfer an aggregate that was hosted on an external shelf to disks housed internally in our test FAS2020 and the same trick can be used to move an aggregate from one shelf to another. The trick uses the disk-replace command. It works serially, and so it is a little time...
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