The last 12 years, one bad RAID controller. Same time period, more then a dozen bad HD's.
On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:57 PM, John DeCarlo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > > > 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/ ** > ************************************************************************* > ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
