radish;237153 Wrote: > RAID is not a backup solution, nor is it a valid replacement for a > backup solution. RAID serves two main purposes - improved performance > (striping) and reduced downtime (fault tolerance/hotswap). Unless > you're running a radio station from slimserver (how cool would that > be?!) I don't think either of those criteria are particularly important > for typical slim usage. > > Backing up to DVD (or something similar) is a good idea, but don't > forget to (a) test the backups every so often - discs don't last > forever and (b) keep them somewhere else.
Radish is correct that you also need a backup solution. Allow me to expand on the point about RAID. There are many kinds of RAID: 0,1,5, 10 are the most popular. RAID itself stands for Redundant Array if Independent Disks. RAID0, or striping, as he mentioned, is used to improve performance, but offers no high availability - if you lose a single disk, you've lost your entire LUN. RAID1 is a mirror done at the disk level. This will halve your available disk, but give you a continuous synchronous copy. There is a bit of a performance hit on writes since you have to write everything twice. RAID5 creates a parity disk. Basically, you can string together 4 disks, lose about 20% capacity, and be able to withstand the loss of 1 disk without losing data. There is a nominal read performance gain, and a definite write performance hit (the overhead of writing to multiple places). RAID10 first mirrors the disks, then stripes them for speed. downside is losing 1/2 your capacity. Just remember 2 things: 1. it is not a question of IF your disk fails, it is a matter of WHEN. These are spinning physical media. They will absolutely fail over time. 2. HDD do not like heat. If you are packing a bunch of drives in a tight enclosure, make sure to provide enough space between them and adequate air flow across them. Hot disks = shorter life. It is not difficult to cook your disk. -- ob_kook SB2 --> Axiom passive pre --> Portal Paladin monoblocks --> Dynaudio Contour 1.3 MKII ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ob_kook's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1383 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=39558 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
