His plan is to split the disks into 6 partitions. Each of his six RAID5 arrays will only use 1 partition of each physical disk. If he were to lose a disk, all 6 RAID5 arrays would only see 1 failed disk. If he gets 2 read errors, on different disks, at the same time, he has a 1/6 chance they would be in the same array (which would be bad). Everything SHOULD work just fine. :) His plan is to combine the 6 arrays with LVM or a linear array. Guy -----Original Message----- From: linux-raid-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:linux-raid-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mario Holbe Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 3:59 PM To: linux-raid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Spares and partitioning huge disks 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 - 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
