On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 18:46 -0700, Ross Werner wrote: > On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, Jeff Schroeder wrote: > > Bang for the buck. I'm using 300GB+ drives, and having to buy 33% more > > drives for the redundancy (is my math right?) can get expensive across > > many servers. > > What's your process for when a drive fails on your software RAID 5 > machines? Have you always been able to boot with one drive gone? Or do you > have some sort of boot CD with software RAID configured properly on it? I > have only tried out RAID 5 once, on a server that ate hard drives for > lunch, and I was never able to successfully boot after a drive bit the > dust, and using software RAID whenever a drive failed the machine would > lock up completely.
Sure. On hardware RAID, there's no problems booting off a degraded RAID. If you only have software RAID-5, linux can't boot off that anyway, so there's no problem. Just create a boot partition on either a separate drive, or a separate partition. The problem with the latter is if the disk that failed had you boot partition, you are out of luck. A way around that would be to clone the boot partition onto every disk I suppose. In any event, software RAID-5 does have significant issues to plan for and I would not recommend using it in a situation where hardware RAID-5 is clearly the better way to go. Even for home use, for $200 you can pick up a pretty decent SATA RAID controller. The way I look at it, for my persona use, my home directory is most important. So if I'm going to use Software RAID-5 to get lots of storage, I'll put my home directory there, along with my general storage area. Then I run a separate root disk and mount it in. The Linux install itself is expendable. my data isn't. Michael > > ~ Ross > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
