>
>
> On 11/24/20 1:20 AM, Simon Matter wrote:
>>> On 23/11/2020 17:16, Ralf Prengel wrote:
>>>> Backup!!!!!!!!
>>>>
>>>> Von meinem iPhone gesendet
>>>
>>> You do have a recent backup available anyway, haven't you? That is:
>>> Even
>>> without planning to replace disks. And testing such
>>> strategies/sequences
>>> using loopback devices is definitely a good idea to get used to the
>>> machinery...
>>>
>>> On a side note: I have had a fair number of drives die on me during
>>> RAID-rebuild so I would try to avoid (if at all possible) to
>>> deliberately reduce redundancy just for a drive swap. I have never had
>>> a
>>> problem (yet) due to a problem with the RAID-1 kernel code itself. And:
>>> If you have to change a disk because it already has issues it may be
>>> dangerous to do a backup - especially if you do a file based backups -
>>> because the random access pattern may make things worse. Been there,
>>> done that...
>>
>> Sure, and for large disks I even go further: don't put the whole disk
>> into
>> one RAID device but build multiple segments, like create 6 partitions of
>> same size on each disk and build six RAID1s out of it.
>
> Oh, boy, what a mess this will create! I have inherited a machine which
> was set up by someone with software RAID like that. You need to replace
> one drive, other RAIDs which that drive's other partitions are
> participating are affected too.
>
> Now imagine that somehow at some moment you have several RAIDs each of
> them is not redundant, but in each it is partition from different drive
> that is kicked out. And now you are stuck unable to remove any of failed
> drives, removal of each will trash one or another RAID (which are not
> redundant already). I guess the guy who left me with this setup listened
> to advises like the one you just gave. What a pain it is to deal with
> any drive failure on this machine!!
>
> It is known since forever: The most robust setup is the simplest one.
I understand that, I also like keeping things simple (KISS).
Now, in my own experience, with these multi terabyte drives today, in 95%
of the cases where you get a problem it is with a single block which can
not be read fine. A single write to the sector makes the drive remap it
and problem is solved. That's where a simple resync of the affected RAID
segment is the fix. If a drive happens to produce such a condition once a
year, there is absolutely no reason to replace the drive, just trigger the
remapping of the bad sector and and drive will remember it in the internal
bad sector map. This happens all the time without giving an error to the
OS level, as long as the drive could still read and reconstruct the
correct data.
In the 5% of cases where a drive really fails completely and needs
replacement, you have to resync the 10 RAID segments, yes. I usually do it
with a small script and it doesn't take more than some minutes.
>
>> So, if there is an
>> issue on one disk in one segment, you don't lose redundancy of the whole
>> big disk. You can even keep spare segments on separate disks to help in
>> case where you can not quickly replace a broken disk. The whole handling
>> is still very easy with LVM on top.
>>
>
> One can do a lot of fancy things, splitting things on one layer, then
> joining them back on another (by introducing LVM)... But I want to
> repeat it again:
>
> The most robust setup is the simplest one.
The good things is that LVM has been so stable for so many years that I
don't think twice about this one more layer. Why is a layered approach
worse than a fully included solution like ZFS? The tools differ but some
complexity always remains.
That's how I see it,
Simon
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