begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 12:36:34PM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > >Then you need to mess about with watching drive lights and running > >find or sync or something to remember what filesystem is on which > >drive. > > Only when you don't use LVM to manage all of your disks as a pool and > don't have RAID for redundancy. Otherwise you don't care and let the > software sort that out.
So... you just give up, and let the drive die, so you can pull the one that isn't spinning? <shudder> > >I like knowing that *this* partition is on *that* disk. > > Works fine for home use. When you have lots of disk you need to move to > a higher level of abstraction. It's important to beat engineers about the head and shoulders for recommending excessively complex solutions that mostly demonstrate how clever they are. I ain't drinkin' yer koolaid. RAID accumulates disks into a meta-disk; in that case, I would still want to know that *this* partition is on *that* array. That's fine. It's all about the replacable unit -- I don't care what platter my data is on, I'll just replace the whole disk. That's the appropriate level of abstraction. I've watched people who play with the mega-massive disk arrays that function on a "higher level of abstraction", and it's very impressive, amazingly flexible, and way cool... until they lose a weekend rebuilding the whole damn thing because something went haywire and now there's no way of determining what data is where (all that data is on a disk, but which one, nobody knows...). Granted, when you start talking about petabytes of data, there's going to be a disk management problem. But that's not where most folks are. -- In technology, "clever" should be a perjorative, not "simple". Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
