... > I'm surprised at how little you guys care for the RAID 5 idea. My ... > Anyway, back to the RAID issue. Doesn't the RAID do something about the > occasional hard drive death? Like, if one dies, I can replace it and not > lose any data? Yeah, sure, the big fire hits and all bets are off, but > otherwise, isn't the RAID 5 setup quite a bit more robust than nothing > at all? You guys make it sound like such a loser. > > I suppose that in RAID, the hard drives never get a break, whereas in > "regular" the one that is currently playing a song runs while the > others idle? Ugh. ...
24x7 use is not that big a factor in my opinion, the heat of 4 drives in a case designed for 1 hdd and some removable media drives is more likely what kills the drives. Anyway, I suppose one's disrespect of RAID is directly tied to the amount of suffering one has incurred from rebuilding arrays and restoring from backup after a failed rebuild :) RAID is inherently unreliable IMHO until you reach 1:1 redundancy levels, and even then you're adding a layer of cost and complexity over the simpler "buy two drives and copy the content" method. Complexity == source of failures. More about pain and suffering: 1) rebuilding a RAID 5 array after losing a drive takes a very long time. Like days and days. I haven't tried it with a SOHO RAID card and some el cheapo IDE drives, but top-of-the-line HPAQ and Dell cards with fast SCSI drives sure do suck. 2) Lose two from a RAID 5 array, you've lost it all. Since people usually build arrays by buying the same drives from the same manufacturer at the same time, chances of losing two at once are remarkably high. 3) What about subtle drive errors which produce drive corruption? I once lost a RAID 1 mirror because the failing drive caused file system corruption on its way out. By the time that the drive actually failed enough for LVM to notice and take it out of the array, the "RAID protected" filesystem was trash. In "buy two drives and copy the content", the copy fails when one of the drives doesn't work perfectly. If you're using hard link backups, you don't trash the copy, so you still have a backup. -- Jack At Monkeynoodle.Org: It's A Scientific Venture... "Believe what you're told; there'd be chaos if everyone thought for themselves." -- Top Dog hotdog stand, Berkeley, CA _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
