Solaris

Hello,
I have a few questions about format and disks in general. Would like to get some interpretation.
defects:
primary: ..... defects form the factory?
grown: ........ defects happening as drive is in use?

What would be a rule of thumb regarding a point when the drive would require it to be swapped?
refresh ....... does this repair errors ; soft; hard ?
Is there a command that is nondestructive that could clean up soft; hard errors?

fsck does some of this I know, I would need to reboot off the mirror, mnt the drive and then do fsck, is this correct?
Anything you wish to add here is all good...

Thanks for the time; I am an old hardware guy new System admin. I like the admin side the best. Get to use the skills I received when I went to the Sun schools.

Usually the disk firmware marks the bad sectors and tries to replace them. In the SAN environment that is what hot swaps are all about

If you get disk errors you need to think replacement. Not repair. Losing data if far more expensive to the company than replacing drives or controllers. We has a massive data clenaup that involved about 40 pepole doing data entry for 2 days, plus all of the system and application tech messing around required. We could almost have bought a new low-end SAN for the cost.

Very good advice and is appreciated, however these servers run applications that are routing traffic such as phone and video. So the systems typically have boot and a boot mirror. I am asking the questions because some of the server's uptime spans 2 - 4 years without reboots. The iostat log looks like it has errors, run refresh on the drive and nothing. Check the defects see some primary errors and the grown list 0. So I am trying to determine the best practice, and trying to understand just what the defect list in format is telling me.

Thanks for the input you have provided.

You should check if the errors numbers in iostat are increasing over time. If so, then there is no other way as to replace the faulty disk. As for the uptime consideration, many Sun machine types allow for hot swapping of the disk devices. You should check in your system's service manual if it is the case for your hardware.

Low level format LLF in some cases may extend faulty disk life time for a while AKA Zero Level Format.
But you are always encouraged to replace faulty disks as faults starts to appear , to save yourself the hassle