Disk Failures
Let's now consider disks drives might not work (before considering
how to deal with disk failures).
- Intermittent failures - we try to do a read or write
but are unsuccessful. After repeated tries though
we succeed.
- Media decay - some bits on a sector become
permanently corrupted and unreadable.
- Write Failures - we write some data but fail.
Worse still, the old data is also gone.
- Disk crash -- entire disk is toasted. That is,
suddenly the disk stops working and is permanently unreadable.