On Sun, 2005-11-27 at 01:50 -0800, trebejo wrote: > I'm surprised at how little you guys care for the RAID 5 idea. ... > 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.
Yes, it is more robust than nothing at all; the concern is that there are significant, broad failure classes that RAID does nothing at all to address, and that you might a) get sloppy because you think RAID protects you, or b) run out of money. Provided that you don't spend money setting up RAID 5 that you should be spending on your off-site solution, and that you don't put off the off-site solution because you get lulled into a false sense of security because of the RAID setup, then yes, RAID is a grand idea. All of my machines at work have the data stored on a RAID-1 array, and when I get to replace the hardware in a few weeks, the new machines are going to use RAID-1 for everything. Yes, we're paranoid, but it does make recovering from a hard drive failure *much* easier and faster, and it has saved us a significant amount of time and effort in the past, so my boss is convinced. You should be aware that there is a performance penalty for using RAID5; every time you write a sector to disk, you must read the same sector from each of the other drives in your array and recompute the checksums. For a music library that doesn't change much (i.e., many more reads than writes), you won't pay too much of a penalty for using RAID5. If you intend to use the headless server for other applications as well, it may be worth investigating either RAID 1 or RAID 0+1 instead (RAID 0 is, I think, worse than useless, but it looks like you already know that). I'd also install smartmontools as a way of getting at least some information out of the server about the health of the hard drives, and something like logcheck to automatically email the results to you so that you don't have to remember to check. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
