Theo Van Dinter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 09:37:51PM -0400, Douglas Alan wrote:
> > I've had two drives die at the same time on a RAID. Good thing the > > RAID was only used as our backup server. I'd never trust RAID again to > > be any kind of security against disk failure. > So have I, but I still swear by RAID (HW RAID if I can get it) on servers > with any importance. A quote from LISA a few years ago comes to mind: > "Low probability events do happen, which is why people still play the > lottery." - Elizabeth Zwicky at LISA '99 As I see it, that low probability is multiplied by the fact that if your RAID fails you lose a lot more data than you would have if you had just had two disk drives fail. They also don't protect you against accidental "rm -rf /"'s and the like. Consequently, I'd just rather have a good backup system in place, than rely on a RAID for reliability. (The backup system, though, might very well be rsyncing daily snapshots to a RAID.) This is assuming that you don't need 24x7x365 uptime, in which case it might certainly make sense to have a RAID that allows you to hot-swap in and out replacement drives. If your server is that important, though, I should think that you'd want to mirror disks (RAID 1), rather than RAID 5. I think it likely that RAID often hinders server performance, by making all your disk drives work in tandem, rather than allowing different processes to peform independent i/o on different disk drives. In addition to RAIDs for backup servers, we've also used RAIDs for manipulating large amounts of data that wouldn't easily fit on a single disk drive. In these cases, though the data could be recreated, albeit a bit painfully, if need be, in case of failure. |>oug _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
