Understanding Latent Sector Errors and How to Protect Against Them

Latent sector errors (LSEs) refer to the situation where particular sectors on a drive become inaccessible. LSEs are a critical factor in data reliability, since a single LSE can lead to data loss when encountered during RAID reconstruction after a disk failure. LSEs happen at a significant rate in the field [1], and are expected to grow more frequent with new drive technologies and increasing drive capacities. While two approaches, data scrubbing and intra-disk redundancy, have been proposed to reduce data loss due to LSEs, none of these approaches has been evaluated on real field data. This paper makes two contributions. We provide an extended statistical analysis of latent sector errors in the field, specifically from the view point of how to protect against LSEs. In addition to providing interesting insights into LSEs, we hope the results (including parameters for models we fit to the data) will help researchers and practitioners without access to data in driving their simulations...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: FAST
• Authors: Bianca Schroeder, Sotirios Damouras, Phillipa Gill
• Keywords: Data Loss, Disk Failures, FAST 2010, Latent Sector Errors, Operating System