On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 13:18:00 -0500, Aaron S. Joyner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > First sentence, untrue. The proper way to state this would be that most > on-board IDE controllers are not capable of hot swapping drives. And > since most boxen these days use the on-board controller, most internally > mounted IDE drives can not be swapped. On the other hand, most on-board > RAID controllers, or almost all PCI RAID controllers, are capable of > swapping in and out drives. Most can even disconnect one drive on a > channel, while leaving the other drive on the channel sufficiently > intact. I have done this numerous times in the BSD world, with generic > PC hardware, so I know the hardware is capable of it. It's been a while > since I've done it in the Linux world, so I can't describe the process > off the top of my head, but I imagine there are folks on the list who > can. In the case of internal drives used for backups, you're often > going to need to add a controller -- make it a $20 IDE RAID controller, > and you can easily swap in and out the disks. Even if they're in a > drive enclosure which is attached to said controller. :)
While we're talking about RAID what version of RAID would people suggest? A couple of weeks ago I had my 160GB /home drive die on me and I'm thinking of replacing it with a RAID setup. The idea here isn't to replace regular backups, but rather to make it so that I'm not completely screwed if a drive decides to die on me. Should I go with two large drives and mirror it or would it be better to get 3 slightly smaller drives and do something like RAID 5? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each setup? Also, should I consider getting a "$20 IDE RAID controller" or just use software RAID? Thanks. Cheers, Tanner -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
