Formatting Fujitsu Eagles under 4.2 BSD Unix

[Spencer W. Thomas]

In article <478 at mcvax.UUCP> jim at mcvax.UUCP (Jim McKie) writes:
>In article <232 at resonex.UUCP> nancy at resonex.UUCP (Nancy Blachman) writes:
>    .......... I have tried formatting disks with the Unix 4.2 format 
>    routine.  It took me 13 hours on a 400 mbyte disk.  I have also 
>    formatted Eagles using the Emulex format routine which takes 2 1/2 
>    hours..............................................................
>
>But we don't do 'severe burn in', just 'worst-case media-test'. 

I think the 'severe burn in' is well worth while.  It finds many more
potentially bad spots than the other tests.  Given that any disk (Eagles
included -- from personal experience) will eventually "develop" new bad
spots, a little extra time up front is worth a lot of agony later on.
Also, adding new bad blocks to the list is a real pain -- the list of
bad blocks is kept in sorted order, so when you add a block to it, all
the ones after it must be shifted down one (i.e., you need to copy the
contents of the forwarded block to the next physical block on the disk).

-- 
=Spencer
	({ihnp4,decvax}!utah-cs!thomas, thomas at utah-cs.ARPA)
	"A sharp tongue is the only edge tool that grows keener with
	 constant use" - Washington Irving