On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 at 9:49am, AndyLiebman@xxxxxxx wrote > Have you ever tested your systems while one of your RAID5 arrays is > rebuilding or verifying? (I'm about to do that right now). I'm wondering if Linux > Software RAID-0 might falter if one of the two arrays is significantly slower than > the other (while rebuilding)? I've had arrays under normal (sporadically heavy) usage during a rebuild, and there wasn't a problem. > My inclination is to not use a hot spare. Instead, I rely on 3ware's email > notification feature to alert me that a drive needs to be replaced. I always > keep a spare handy that can be popped into place immediately. Also, I want to > have control over when rebuilding takes place. It would be a bad thing to rebuild > during certain critical high I/O moments of the day -- whereas rebuilding at > night would be much less stressful on the system. Do you see anything wrong > with this approach? Yes -- it requires you to be on call 24x7 for maximum protection. And even then the level of protection is less than with a hot spare, given that it will take you time to get from whereever you are to whereever the server is. Also, disks can sometimes have a tendency to go in quick succession. I would *strongly* recommend a hot spare. Remember, you're cutting your reliability in half by striping the two arrays. Why not maximally protect those individual arrays? -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
