On Windows, we’ve had the defrag tool and others, that happily works on a drive even while it is in use, even the OS disk.
On Linux, I know of the fsck command but that requires the drive in question to be unmounted. Not great when you want to check a running server. I do not want to stop my server and boot it from USB, just to run a disk check. I can’t imagine that’s what the data centers are doing, either!
Surely some Linux tool exists that can do some basic checks on a running system?
Nearly all systems have some sort of background error checking which periodically reads all data and validates it hasn’t changed. They also watch for SMART errors and pre-fail disks before they die entirely.
They use all forms of RAID (Netapp is a weird dual stripe RAID 4, for example) and Erasure coding primarily.
How does that invalidate anything I said?
Dude I think this is a more you ain’t smart enough to know that youre not smart… just take the L