Hi all, I'm completely new to RAID but I think I have understood the basics. :-) I am thinking about setting up a home-server with SW-RAID-1 on two external USB2 (or firewire) drives. Only var and home (and possibly tmp) will be mounted on these drives. My main objective is to have a low-cost, reliable (but not necessarily fast) system at home; with USB2 devices it is also easy to swap drives without opening the box. I have spent too many hours restoring from backups due to failed mechanical hardware. The only mechanical hardware left in my system now are these two harddrives (and the backup harddrive). I don't see any problems using external USB2 drives for RAID-1 in normal operation (am I wrong here?). However my question is: How does the RAID SW detect a drive failure on such external drives? _Will_ it be able to detect which drive is failing if for example one of the drives simply starts to send out garbage data? I assume that most USB<->ATA bridges implements some kind of minimal set of commands used for normal operation, but failing drives are not "normal" as such... If the RAID SW is not able to detect which drive is failing I can just as well avoid using RAID... Any thoughts? Best regards Preben - 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
