Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!udel!mmdf From: dillon%cory.berkeley.edu@UDEL.EDU Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Self-repairing SCSI disks! Message-ID: <4382@louie.udel.EDU> Date: 3 Oct 88 21:55:32 GMT Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU Lines: 37 Received: from CUNYVM by CUNYVM.BITNET (Mailer X2.00) with BSMTP id 2935; Fri, 30 Sep 88 16:57:54 EDT Received: from UDEL.EDU by CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (IBM VM SMTP R1.1) with TCP; Fri, 30 Sep 88 16:57:49 EDT Received: by Louie.UDEL.EDU id af10648; 30 Sep 88 13:04 EDT Received: from Louie.UDEL.EDU by Louie.UDEL.EDU id af10283; 30 Sep 88 12:30 EDT Received: from USENET by Louie.UDEL.EDU id aa10236; 30 Sep 88 12:25 EDT From: Matt Dillon Subject: Re: Self-repairing SCSI disks! Message-ID: <8809300243.AA20500@cory.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 30 Sep 88 02:43:48 GMT To: amiga-relay@UDEL.EDU Sender: amiga-relay-request@UDEL.EDU >>1. What causes this? > > The validator process of the file system is running. Speaking of which, before I got my hard disk I was worried that I would destroy it about as often as I screw up floppies. Needless to say this just didn't have me worried, it had me *very* worried. Fortunetly, after getting my HD, I have had no problems at all. The major reason is that, going through an external (SCSI) interface, it is nearly impossible to destroy more than one sector in the worst of all practical cases in a crash situation. In fact, with SCSI, you never get half-written-out sectors since incomplete SCSI commands produce error codes. The main problem with the floppies, as we found out years ago (the Delay(0) -> track destroyed problem), is that entire tracks can be destroyed if the trackdisk.device goes bonkers in the latter situation due to the fact that the MFM encoding is being done by the Amiga. Also, if your Amiga crashes in the middle of writing a track out to floppy, you can loose an entire track. -Matt