On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 12:35:43PM -0600, Kenneth Burgener wrote:
> 
> Yes, better, as in if you read my original email, disk capacity, not
> redundancy, was my number 1 concern.

Disk capacity is your number 1 concern, but you still won't be happy if
you lose all of your data.  The problem is that a volume composed of 4
disks is much more likely to fail than a volume on a single disk.

As Michael mentioned, you might be able to recover some of your data if
you use LVM.  However, there is still a good chance that losing one disk
will kill the entire volume.


> With 1TB, a backup is not economically feasible, and I accept this.
> What I am asking is if one disk in a RAID 0 begins to die, if I could
> rebuild that one disk somehow, and just accept the loss of what data
> was on that disk, without having to move EVERYTHING off the array, and
> then rebuilding the array.  My assumption is RAID 5 has this ability.

RAID 5 makes it so that a single disk can die without having to restore
from backups.  However, it's always possible that two will die at about
the same time.  This is especially true if your disks are from the same
lot, or if it takes several weeks to replace a disk.  If you use RAID or
LVM, you have to accept that sometimes you will lose ALL of your data.

If you are perfectly happy losing all of your data, put LVM on all of
your disks.  If you have data that you don't want to lose, save out one
of your disks from your LVM volume, put it in an external enclosure, and
regularly backup your important files to it.  If you're happy to lose
all of your data, but you'd rather it didn't happen very often for
convenience's sake, then use RAID 5.


-- 
Andrew McNabb
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55  8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

/*
PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net
Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug
Don't fear the penguin.
*/

Reply via email to