On Windows, we’ve had the defrag tool and others, that happily works on a drive even while it is in use, even the OS disk.

On Linux, I know of the fsck command but that requires the drive in question to be unmounted. Not great when you want to check a running server. I do not want to stop my server and boot it from USB, just to run a disk check. I can’t imagine that’s what the data centers are doing, either!

Surely some Linux tool exists that can do some basic checks on a running system?

  • teft@startrek.website
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    10 months ago

    So they swap the drives like i said? I never mentioned them correcting them online or checking them online or any of that mess. I just said they run 1+0 so they can pull a drive and pop a new one in without shutting down. I have two different statements in my comment. I’ll add a paragraph break to make it clearer that they aren’t related.

    • nomecks@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Nearly all systems have some sort of background error checking which periodically reads all data and validates it hasn’t changed. They also watch for SMART errors and pre-fail disks before they die entirely.

      They use all forms of RAID (Netapp is a weird dual stripe RAID 4, for example) and Erasure coding primarily.