On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Jeff Wright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> There's no possible, it is. I suppose someone would run their SAN/NAS > as a JBOD (just a bunch of disks), but all that does is give you a > little extra storage at the cost of fault tolerance for the drives. > Better to have the best of both worlds, if you can swing it. > RAID has some possible uses nowadays. Sure. Let's see if we can recap. 1. Those with just a little money or those with a lot of money generally find that the risk associated with "hardware RAID" is not worth the expense. The small benefit from a possible disk drive failure is far outweighed by the huge risk from a RAID controller failure or any related hardware failure that makes the RAID disks useless. (Just try taking the RAID disk drives out of one machine and putting them in a new one.) 2. New computers spec'ed to just act as a NAS or database server are pretty darn inexpensive. You don't need lots of RAM or fast CPU as a rule (as always, YMMV). Because of this, in most cases it makes more sense today to duplicate storage on multiple disks and computers - not just multiple disks in one computer. Again, if you do the cost-benefit analysis, you have started moving away from RAID in one machine. 3. Large installations, like Google Ad-Sense, go ahead and use software-RAID (for increased reliability and portability) on the distributed computers. Bottom line? 1. RAID controllers fail, causing complete data loss and useless disk drives. Huge risk for small benefit. 2. Software RAID has fewer parts to fail and the disks can be read on other machines. 3. Distributing data among multiple computers and disks is affordable for even the smallest businesses. And it is the current best practice. 4. Backups are always important no matter how you are increasing availability through redundancy. -- John DeCarlo, My Views Are My Own ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
