Neil Brown wrote:
On Monday August 27, jpiszcz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I have a few people who asked me this as well, RAID10 or similiar (SW). I
am not so sure, with RAID1 you can have your root disks on it and boot
from it using LILO/GRUB and it is proven pretty stable; can the same be
said about RAID10?
For your boot partition, use raid1 - not raid10.
For others, you get to choose.
The md/raid10 module was created to make is easier to manage a
combination of striping and mirroring, and to provide extra
functionality such as handling an odd number of drives, and 'far' or
'offset' modes which provide raid0-like read performance.
And this is the first (of two) reasons to use RAID-10, it's fast. Even
with a boatload of read ahead, RAID-1 will give you peak read speed of
about that of a single drive. RAID-10 will run at multiples of that.
If the extra features don't attract you, and you are not put off by
needing to create a multi-level array, then by all means use raid0
over raid1. That code is more mature and hence technically safer.
However if you want the extra features or the easier management, then
I believe the raid10 code is perfectly safe to use. Yes, there have
been bugs. But I don't know of any data that has been lost.
And that's the other reason to use RAID-10, although there have been
issues, they are not loss of data issues AFAIK, which gives me reason to
favor the performance solution.
Of course, if you want "enterprise grade" reliability, you should
contract with an appropriate supplier, and follow their
recommendations - not mine.
Having run servers at a national ISP for 12 years I would recommend HDS
and Network Appliance. HDS reliability, performance, and price, and
NetApp for over the top tech support (they sent someone to their
*museum* to check cable routing on an old box)! I was *very* unhappy
with EMC in terms of price, performance, reliability, marketing
techniques and tech support. I don't have experience enough with other
vendors to offer an opinion, I didn't work with them personally.
As to choice of kernel: debian/unstable has 2.6.22. I would use
that if you are using Debian... I wonder why it hasn't migrated to
'testing' yet.
--
bill davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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