[resending, my first was blocked in moderator queue] Edward Net Harvey opined: > But even losing 5% of your > files is usually considered fatal, so that's why people usually adopt the > strategy of never losing more than their redundancy level, and make sure you > have backups.
Indeed; the unRAID sales pitch smacks of a solution in search of a problem. A problem I didn't know I had. The built-in Linux RAID5 does it quite well for me, allowing mismatched drives, providing quite-high performance given today's high-speed processors, and with far superior monitoring capability than any hardware solution I've used in the past. (My RAID arrays are all in my Nagios config, without any difficult-to-configure device driver that needs to be overhauled whenever I do a hardware upgrade.) Once or twice a year, I get an alert telling me to swap out a drive. Usually the drive is under warranty so I just send it back to the manufacturer and get a replacement in a week or so. Good enough for me. And, arguably, good enough for all but the most demanding corporate data centers. I /always/ use RAID even for a desktop. If I want some of the benefits that unRAID promises, namely the ability to recover an entire filesystem from a single drive, then I use RAID1. Backups used to be a harder problem but some of the online services have gotten good enough to make this a whole lot more automatic without a lot of cost. With terabyte drives in the $50 price range, I can't see a situation where kernel-based software RAID1 or RAID10 wouldn't be good enough (performance and pricewise) for virtually any demanding situation. The equation will be different in a couple of years when solid-state storage finally starts to eclipse rotating media after a half-century of dominance by the latter. -rich _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
