[geeks] HD/IDE question

[velociraptor]

On 9/20/06, velociraptor <velociraptor at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am going to do the surface analysis on the Mac as my first step, as
> that will isolate if the disk itself is the problem (I currently have
> another Seagate disk of the same model in the FW cannister that I will
> be using, so everything will be "known good" other than the disk).
>
> I am ignorant of Windows' low-level stuff so I don't know if assuming
> the Promise RAID Lite works like I'd expect a *NIX HW RAID is a
> reasonable thing to do.  E.g., while I might see errors in the SMART
> report, I *should not* see complete failure errors in Windows event
> manager because the HW RAID would mask them by getting the data off
> the good disk.  At most, I should see timeout errors.

Turns out it was bad blocks on one of the disks of the mirror.  So,
the RAID hardware was still trying to read/write from the bad blocks
of that disk instead of failing it out of the mirror.

Upshot, surfing around showed me that Promise RAID is not all that
hot.  I won't be putting the root mirror back on this on-board mobo
controller.  The experience has shown me that I made a hasty decision
in putting all this  data on proprietary file systems.

Short term, I will be buying a disk[0] large enough for all the data
that needs to be migrated off of NTFS.

So, the next question: recommendations for a file system which is
readable and writeable by all the major OSes? E.g. OS X, Solaris,
Linux, *BSD, Windows XP?  Ext2/3 appears to be the only choice for
support of files >2GB.  I'd be interested to hear other suggestions
and/or anyone's experiences using the tools for ext2 under non-Linux
OSes.

I don't anticipate actually locally mounting this RAID 5 under OS X or
Solaris, but I'd rather keep the doors open than closed as I
ignorantly did in the present iteration.

Thanks--
=Nadine=

[0] These are the best prices I've seen on this size of drive, and
since I need another external drive container as well:
<http://shop2.outpost.com/product/4882800>  For a bare drive:
<http://shop4.outpost.com/product/4924331>