I have a 4 disk 5TB raid5 setup where a disk is showing signs of going down the drain. It is reporting media errors and from dmesg I can see that several read errors are corrected. smartctl does report "notifications" but no panic so far. Since new disks are rather expensive at the moment I am starting to pondering exactly how robust the linux md layer is.

I would appreciate if someone could shed some light on how md actually deals with disk errors. For example how does md deal with write and read errors - what does it (really) take for disk to be rejected from an array. I also read that recently md got support for mapping out bad blocks. Does this mean that the read errors I've had would have been mapped out if I where running kernel >3.1 or would md still try to "work on them" to make them usable.