Multiple hard disk failures - coincidence ?

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, 2004-Dec-18 20:59:11 +0100, Bernd Walter wrote:
>On Sat, Dec 18, 2004 at 08:17:39PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>> My approach to this is to add a line similar to 
>>   dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/null bs=32k
>> for each disk into /etc/daily.local (or /etc/weekly.local or whatever).
>> This ensures that the disks are readable on a regular basis.
>
>Regular reading of every file is part of what I call backup.

That only verifies the used part of the disk.  Reading the unused parts
of the disk as well helps reduce surprises.  Also, in a mirrored environment,
the backup does not ensure that the data can be read off both disks.
(Or the parity area for RAID-5).

-- 
Peter Jeremy