Until now I haven't really paid too much attention to the RAID-6 stuff, but I have an application which needs to be as resilient to disk failures as possible. So other than what's at: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hpa/ and the archives of this list (which I'm re-reading now), can anyone give me a quick heads-up about it? Specifically I'm still buried in the dark days of 2.4.27/28 - are there recent patches against 2.4? If RAID-6 isn't viable for me right now, what I'm planning is as follows: Put 8 x 250GB SATA drives in the system, and arrange them in 4 pairs of RAID-1 units. Assemble the 4 RAID-1 units into a RAID-5. Big waste of disk space, but thats not really important for this application, and disk is cheap, (relatively) So I'll end up with just over 700GB of usable storage, with the potential of surviving a minimum of any 3 disks disks failing, and possibly 4 or 5, depending on just where they fail (although disks would be replaced way before it got to that stage!) Certainly any 2 can fail, and if it were 2 in the same RAID-1 unit, (which would cause the RAID-5 to become degraded) and I were desperate, I could move a disk and deliberately fail another RAID-1 to recover the RAID-5 ... In the absence of RAID-6, would anyone do it differently? Note: I'm relatively new to mdadm, but can see it's the way of the future, (especially after I had to use it in-anger recently to recover from a 2-disk failure in an old 8-disk RAID-5 array), and I'm looking at the spare-groups part of it all and wondering if that might be an alternative, but I'd like to avoid the possibility of the array failing catastrophically during a re-build if at all possible. Cheers, Gordon - 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
