Detecting latent sector faults in modern SCSI disks

Abstract

The authors present new improved methods for detecting latent sector faults in a disk subsystem as caused by media deterioration of the disk magnetic storage material. In case of media deterioration on the rarely accessed sectors, a latent disk fault may remain undetected for a long time. An adaptive algorithm is proposed to utilize the idle time of the disk for scanning commonly used SCSI disks.<>