maarten <maarten@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I just got my 4 new 250GB disks. I have read someone on this list advocating > that it is better to build arrays with smaller volumes, as that decreases the > chance of failure, especially failures of two disks in a raid5 configuration. This might be true for read-errors. However, if a whole disk dies (perhaps because the IDE controller fails, I assume you're having IDE disks or because of a temperature failure or something like that) with a couple of partitions on it, you get a lot of simultaneously 'disks' (partitions), which would completely kill your RAID5, because RAID5 can IMHO only recover one failing device. I'd assume, such a setup would kill you in this case, while with only 4 devices (whole 250G disks) you'd survive it. I'm quite sure one could get it managed back together with more or less expert knowledge, but I belive the complete RAID would stop processing first. Just to make this clear - all this are spontaneous assumptions, I did never play with RAID5. regards, Mario -- I heard, if you play a NT-CD backwards, you get satanic messages... That's nothing. If you play it forwards, it installs NT. - 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
