izumi@fugitive.berkeley.edu (Izumi Ohzawa) (12/12/90)
Is there any way to obtain error correction statistics on read/writes for optical disks? All the postings on B-land cubes and cooling fan blowing the wrong way got me thinking about it. Perhaps, if we could track the error rate for an optical media over time, we could get some idea on whether the laser optics on the drive is accumulating too much dust and requires the cleaning. Someone actually posted cleaning devices for the media, and drive, available from NeXT, but is the drive cleaner actually safe? It can't be good to clean the optics too frequently, if the optics is clean and OK. On the other hand, you don't want to wait until you lose some data from your OD. I have not lost any OD myself, but I don't feel secure about the state of write operations to the disk, not knowing how much dust could have accumuated inside optical read/write head. Imagine about marginal writes which could occur (unknowingly to you) because of reduce laser power --> lower temperature rise above the Curie point. The disk may become unreadable even on perfectly clean drive if written on a marginal drive. It seems that the system software should be able to monitor error statistics on each media, and give some warnings on the possibility of too much dust on optical drive optics. The system kernel or the optical storage processor must be keeping something on ECC error rate, and I would like to see how my drives are operating. Does anybody know how?? Izumi Ohzawa, izumi@violet.berkeley.edu
wiml@milton.u.washington.edu (William Lewis) (12/12/90)
In article <1990Dec11.232841.9991@agate.berkeley.edu> izumi@fugitive.berkeley.edu (Izumi Ohzawa) writes: >Is there any way to obtain error correction statistics on >read/writes for optical disks? /etc/disk will give you ECC statistics in return for the correct options. You have to own the /dev/rod?? device to make it work, though, or be root. Beware that /etc/disk also has options for "initialize" and "bulk erase", though... -- wiml@milton.acs.washington.edu Seattle, Washington (William Lewis) | 47 41' 15" N 122 42' 58" W "These 2 cents will cost the net thousands upon thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Are you sure you want to do this?"