On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 12:19:59PM +0800, Fritz Mesedilla wrote: > Hey Jijo! Long time no hear. :D
:) > Actually, the IBM person who services us recommended raid 5 and > proceeded to configure the servers for us. hehehe! While I admit that most often than not I'd rather do things and let people watch, I don't think that sort of thing really works. "Teach a man how to fish", they say. Oh well, it's up to you to learn, then. > After this only 4 drives are read by the IBM SCSI manager as 1 logical > drive while the other 1 drive is considered swap drive. *scratches > head* > > Does this mean 4 drives are doing the parity thing of raid 5 while the > 5th one is ready for swapping? Sabi lang kasi ng IBM tech ready for > failover na yan. This means that you have a four-drive RAID-5 array, with one drive on standby as a hot-spare. It's ready for failover, meaning if a drive crashes, the system will automatically rebuild the array using the hot-spare, which, as I said in the previous email, allows you to get out of degraded most in the fastest possible time. The bummer with that is you've got a drive doing nothing most of the time. > Medyo takot lang ako kasi hindi ako yung gumawa ng raid. :D If > something happens tapos hindi ikaw yung tumira parang kabado ka di ba. > Nangyari na kasi dati IBM tech din yung nag configure ng raid 5 test > server namin tapos 1 drive failed, hinugot ko para palitan... > nag-crash yung control... parang nalito yung controller. hehehe. I had > to rebuild linux install again. The tech guy had to come back and > flash the scsi controller. That sort of attitude (that you have) is what gets people to learn a new thing every day. The problem before had nothing to do with hot-spares or RAID-5, though. It had everything to do with a flakey controller BIOS, that the tech guy flashed. So much for love. Kaya nga sabi nila, hindi purkit naka-RAID ka na eh wala ka nang backup. If you value your data, back up (is what they always say). :) > So I was wondering why it didn't work for me when I tried hot swapping > it. Baka may tama lang yung scsi controller? Yup! Hence the controller BIOS upgrade. > Ok so tama ba ganito? Basta raid 5 hot swappable yung scsi I can just > remove the drive and replace it? It has nothing to do with RAID-5. If your controller supports hot-swapping, you can remove the drive, replace it, and rebuild the array all in real time. I do this with my 3ware Escalade, too, which does hardware IDE RAID. You can employ any RAID level you wish and still have a hot-spare if you want and still do hot-swapping if you want. Well... except for RAID-0, since there's no redundancy there. As I said in my previous email, I highly recommend you consider RAID-10 over RAID-5. At the expense of a little usable space, you get better performance and more reliability. You can keep that hot-spare, too, for even more reliability. :) --> Jijo -- Federico Sevilla III : http://jijo.free.net.ph : When we speak of free Network Administrator : The Leather Collection, Inc. : software we refer to GnuPG Key ID : 0x93B746BE : freedom, not price. -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
