On Tuesday 28 October 2003 00:42, berk walker wrote: > The purpose of my going to raid is to ensure, short of a total > meltdown/fire, etc, data loss prevention. If my house and business > burn, I'm hosed anyway. Maybe you'r hosed but note that it's not _that_ complicated to prevent dataloss in case of catastrophic events (fire/theft). A simple single external (USB/Firewire, now SATA) drive that you store in another location can be a huge advantage. You could e.g. buy 2 external drives, leave one plugged into your server (copy data every night onto this disk), store the other in a different location and swap these drives every week. > I am buying 4 maxtor 40 gb/200mb ultra 133 drives, and another promise > board, to finally do swraid5 (after reading this list for a few months, > it seems pretty scary in failure). I would suggest to buy quality drives. Two disk failures are not very common but can occur. Sometimes a single quality drive can be more reliable than 4 low quality drives bundled to a 4disk-RAID5. I personally like the Western Digital "JB" (Special Edition) series and the new, although quite expensive, Raptor series. Moreover they provide excellent performance. A measure for the quality of a drive may be the warranty, WD gives 3 years on the "JB"-series and 5 years on the Raptors. > is there an advantage to >more< than 1 spare drive? .. more than 3 > drives in mdx? why not cp old boot/root/whatever drive to mdx after > booting on floppy? Maybe I don't fully understand your question but a spare drive means normally "hot spare" - e.g. if a disk fails, the spare disk gets used. So if you have a 3-disk RAID5 plus 2 spares, you can loose 3 disks (not at the same time!) and still do not suffer from data loss. > is there an advantage to having various mdx's allocated to various > /directories?..ie: /home, var, /etc It certainly makes sense to make different partitions to prevent dataloss due to file system corrpution and the like. I partition my personal system like that: First on "/" Second on "/var" Third on "/home" In some cases you could also add another small partition for "/boot". Anyway, the more partitions you create, the more space gets lost: Let's say you want to store a 4GB file, and there is 2GB on "/", 1GB on "/var" and 1.5GB on "home" left... Best Regards, Hermann -- x1@aon.at GPG key ID: 299893C7 (on keyservers) FP: 0124 2584 8809 EF2A DBF9 4902 64B4 D16B 2998 93C7 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
