Hi, On Tuesday 04 May 2010 16:12:39 plutek wrote: > i'm looking at my pile of external audio drives and backup drives, and > wondering about better solutions. > a friend has recently mentioned multiple-drive bays, which allow you to > swap raw drives in/out at will, eliminating all the individual enclosures. > we also had a discussion about bays which implement hardware RAID for > realtime mirroring. > i'm wondering if any of you have experience with these sorts of devices in > the context of linux multitrack audio work. specific concerns might be > things like: > 1. reduction of total throughput in a combined-disk device relative to > separate drive enclosures connected to their own USB ports I think the bottleneck here is usb, not disks... > 2. reduction of total throughput caused by the RAID mirroring process, even > when it is done by dedicated hardware > 3. linux compatibility > 4. expense > any experience and/or recommendations about doing this sort of thing would > be most welcome! thanks in advance. Here is my advice: Don't do hardware-raid! Neither the real nor the "soft" hardware raid help you that much. What do you do when the controller fails? With a hardware-raid you have to have a second of the same kind in stock to get back the data on your disks. Don't even think about not having a spare controller and buying one when yours fails. Murphies law says the controller will fail at exactly the time you have a _very_ important project going on and the controller to use is not sold anymore. With a software-raid you just plug the disks in another machine/controller and return to working on your project. The "reduced" throughput of a software-raid is worth the ease of use. And its not that "reduced" at all. Oh, and use only raid1 or combinations of 0 and 1. For all the others see http://baarf.com. And if you want more freedom for your disks and partitions, use lvm. Just this month I had a disk in an array of 5 that announced its failing in smart. Marked the raid1-copy of the systempartition on that disk as faulty (hot-spare kicked in), did lvmove to move all the logical volume off that disk and carried the disk to my dealer for an rma. Two weeks later I shoved in the replacement... Server uptime: not interrupted. Admins sanity: not influenced. Of course that only works if you have *some* free space on the physical volumes. Arnold
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