-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 - ----- Original Message ----- > Anthony Carrico <[email protected]> writes: > > I've got two 2T drives (WD20EARS) and an old motherboard for a > > backup > > server (not an easy time for me, but my old backup system, which > > supports a few people, is running out of space). I plan to use raid > > to > > mirror them. Actually I've got four of these drives, two for another > > computer. > > I have 4 750GB drives in a raid 1+0. I've had drive failures due to a > bad SATA cable (easily recoverable, of course), another due to a > proper > drive failure, and its replacement is already showing SMART > Raw_Read_Error_Rate and Hardware_ECC_Recovered counts. "raid 0 and > pray" is good advice for just 2 drives :) . In that case, I'd also > suggest having a spare already on hand, and adopting the policy that a > drive failure is a non-maskable interrupt, that must be dealt with > before anything else.
My personal stuff (hosting box; media server; backup server, even) is all Linux software RAID1 at minimum, since work- and family-obligation interrupts frequently preempt "hobby stuff" for days or even weeks on end. (Congrats on your *ahem* "new family-obligation interrupts", BTW!) > > Ongoing monitoring? > > /me ♥ logwatch and smartd, but I'm an amateur at this stuff. Again, speaking only for my personal boxes: the physical machines' logwatches are the only ones I read religiously, scanning daily for security stuff and the dreaded SMART errors. I backstop that with a rudimentary check (15-minute cron job, but it could easily be parleyed into a Nagios check, for instance) that emails on md array/member failure. That's attached (perl script), without warranty of fitness for any particular purpose blah blah blah etc I rest my case. (Read: I wrote it late at night and it may miss critical conditions. Let me know, will ya? ;-)) > > Is ZFS so great and wonderful that it > > is worth running BSD (instead of Linux) on a backup server? > > ZFS always seemed awesome. But, Apple stopped using ZFS, and Oracle > already cared about btrfs before buying Sun. Is it even an option? I'm certainly no ZFS expert (barely even familiar, really), so please take this worth a grain of salt, but a good buddy of mine (Windows guy) decided to dip his toe in the FOSS waters by building a FreeNAS[1] box with ~6TB of formatted ZFS, only to have it crap out in mysterious and opaque ways. This was at least a year ago, and he turned to me as his "Unix guy" friend to help him recover all his family's digital photos. We tried all manner of juju over the course of a week or two, and got nothing. I recall that the docs (both the ZFS util man pages and web-available stuff) were not terribly helpful, and the whole affair left a bad taste in my mouth. That may have changed in the intervening time, though. Oh, and his were WD "green" drives, of some stripe. Caveat administrator. :-) Cheers, - -sth [1]http://freenas.org sam hooker|[email protected]|http://www.noiseplant.com "Elmo: The Other Red Meat." -akw -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Use GnuPG with Firefox : http://getfiregpg.org (Version: 0.8) iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJNZor/AAoJEPoh2/xXOP2jo/MQALq6kFFYrqisaaQiwif7Vc0c 5JPNpSY8mIKywZDzmYd6x24IcFEk++enFfN73lfNUgGZjPy5jS3hYJdzwmTTfFXD d1MeGOQfTEFt7D2tRZWouONuJsjlnB1dWiqjOIo2tSkvtEuNcSuJgojq8sOrQ07l yFhnLXZ0Cj+c2lMo8rstrzrIPb4FKKRJbQsKByMKYsci9jNI7xkj5lqVmv1Vn9vR BCFUx0SCI5AwR5RQVPDHx2QB+b2HQIoyDBPESdE6G+NOcZfAkZBoMj6cLsHRaZuX AiG5Zq0xqT1hMQAxBQMw416SgRaXXVeD8LZcqKRj0OxY+RIENO67oB5iNuKCgIVd Uxf5F4p4/K0Y5WhpgwE5DkZo9a6Ivjy35dU215Dl9ysX7/vBhUklvuxccaRoYxXh NLuRZmVDijWy5LCJzImsMbtJ8bD6D65OhimA8WszoH5frf+MC049m61B5jhsF4Uq yIUsKy1hRe58y2HS51jQiRr/Ez+s7FC8NLDqelch3Jq5ALoiea82WCTpTaKcxsg4 4/LRoryOg+mFNUG9/LGhq0nBSqODfZAPlBv4fSQoIlSO0uPg3G4nsl9KgWU+y+zV uVF6coDGe3pxHmh/394YYVAHE4hn1Y6+R9ixjIX3bkTVo2i2E3zncV8iKaiHhsDg xHOBFNx+Lbn0xrpRHTG4 =Gb6R -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
raidcheck
Description: Perl program
