[clug] home RAID question

[Michael Cohen]

Hi Eyal,
  Dont make the mistake that many other people have - A raid is not a
  backup solution. In my experience disks on the same physical machine
  tend to die at the same time. Usually disks die as a result of a
  sudden spike, or the bearings seize after the machine has been shut
  down if it has been on for a long time. Raid will not save you in that
  case, and if the data is worth it - its worth a decent backup
  solution. Buy a Lacie drive or a usb drive so you can unplug it and
  store it off site.

  If you want speed, raid is your friend - the redundancy in raid is
  over rated.

  Michael.

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 09:42:51AM +1000, Eyal Lebedinsky wrote:
> I plan to put together a RAID at home. I need to decide if
> I should go with software raid or buy a proper raid controller.
> 
> I want the raid because I will not be able to back up this high
> volume. So reliability is the number one parameter. I expect to
> use raid 5, and I may have a hot spare or do raid 6.
> 
> My experience with software raid is that it generally worked,
> but I had to have good understanding of how to manage it. Some
> stuff was not well documented. The software was raw. Since then
> mdadm was added which may do a better job - I did not get to use
> it.
> 
> At the office, using PATA, we had a lot of IDE errors until we
> moved to using a 3ware controller (with the same disks) and the
> errors mostly went away. I never figured if this was an IDE
> controller problem, IDE driver or cabling (unlikely, as we used
> similar cables for the 3ware). I found this to be a common
> problem at the time (this was 3-4 years ago). We did have tape
> backups at the office which made it painful but not fatal.
> 
> Secondary requirements:
> 	- good performance. This will mostly be doing video
> 	  so it will at most need to handle 2-3 streams
> 	- flexibility: should be able to grow the raid and
> 	  grow the fs without losing the data, preferably
> 	  online
> 	- low CPU load (video will fully use the CPU)
> 
> I will probably use SATA (is this solid in current kernels?).
> 
> -- 
> Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au) <http://samba.org/eyal/>
> 	attach .zip as .dat
> -- 
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