Disk Failure Modes

As you learned in the chapter about RAID, disks are not perfect and can fail (on occasion). In early RAID systems, the model of failure was quite simple: either the entire disk is working, or it fails completely, and the detection of such a failure is straightforward. This fail-stop model of disk failure makes building RAID relatively simple“Implementing Fault-Tolerant Services Using The State Machine Approach: A Tutorial” by Fred B. Schneider. ACM Surveys, Vol. 22, No. 4, December 1990. How to build fault tolerant services. A must read for those building distributed systems..

What you didn’t learn is about all of the other types of failure modes modern disks exhibit. Specifically, as ...