On Tue, 2024-01-30 at 21:35 +0100, Nicolas George wrote: > hw (12024-01-30): > > Yes, and how much effort and how reliable is doing that? > > Very little effort and probably more reliable than hardware RAID with > closed-source hardware.
Well, I doubt it. After all you need to copy a whole partition and must make sure that it doesn't fail through distribution upgrades and all kinds of possible changes and even when someone shuts down or reboots the computer or pulls the plug while the copying is still in progress. You also must make sure that the boot manager is installed on multiple disks. And when you're going to do it? When shutting the machine down? Might not happen and when it does happen, maybe you don't want to wait on it. When rebooting it? Perhaps you don't want to overwrite the copy at that time, or perhaps it's too late then because there were software updates before you rebooted and one of the disks failed when rebooting. Do you suggest to install backup batteries or capacitors to keep the machine running until the copying process has completed when the power goes out? Or do you want to do it all manually at a time convenient for you? What if you forgot to do it? I'm not so silly that you could convince me that you can do it more reliably than the hardware RAID does it whith a bunch of scripts you put together yourself, especially not by implying that the hardware raid which has been tested in many datacenters with who knows how many hundreds of thousands of machines over many years uses closed source software which has been maintained and therefore must be unreliable. The lowest listed MTBF of hardware RAID is over 260000 hours (i. e. about 30 years) on [1]. Can you show that you can do it more reliably with your bunch of scripts? [1]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000007641/server-products/sasraid.html
