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MrSoftware
- Joined Oct 29, 2013
- 2,273
To the OP - if you want to see the fault statistics of your hard disk, get a disk controller that fully supports S.M.A.R.T. and provides the data to the user (link below). Use that to query your disk and you'll get more details than you want. If you have SCSI disks (unlikely), I don't think they typically support S.M.A.R.T. but they can provide similar detailed info, if you have a controller that can read it.
Data integrity requires a layered approach. At the lowest level, the hard disk firmware should detect and ignore bad blocks transparently to the higher levels. The statistics are available to disk controllers that have the smarts to ask for it, but not all do. The higher end server controllers typically make this data available, the typical users level controllers not as much. The S.M.A.R.T. interface provides quite a lot of info, but not all controllers can request all of the info, or make it visible to the user. But I think most these days will at least give a warning when certain errors start to occur. More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. The next level up would be some sort of software (or firmware) level redundancy, such as one of the various RAID types, or similar. This layer spreads the data across multiple drives, so if there's a failure on one drive the data can be recovered from another drive or drives. Above that is the file system, which can have redundancies itself. For example modern versions of NTFS have redundant Master File Tables (MFT), and ZFS has some RAID-like options. Finally you should always have backups of any data that would be painful to lose. If all the other layers fail, and sometimes they do, restore from backup.
Data integrity requires a layered approach. At the lowest level, the hard disk firmware should detect and ignore bad blocks transparently to the higher levels. The statistics are available to disk controllers that have the smarts to ask for it, but not all do. The higher end server controllers typically make this data available, the typical users level controllers not as much. The S.M.A.R.T. interface provides quite a lot of info, but not all controllers can request all of the info, or make it visible to the user. But I think most these days will at least give a warning when certain errors start to occur. More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. The next level up would be some sort of software (or firmware) level redundancy, such as one of the various RAID types, or similar. This layer spreads the data across multiple drives, so if there's a failure on one drive the data can be recovered from another drive or drives. Above that is the file system, which can have redundancies itself. For example modern versions of NTFS have redundant Master File Tables (MFT), and ZFS has some RAID-like options. Finally you should always have backups of any data that would be painful to lose. If all the other layers fail, and sometimes they do, restore from backup.
