Hi, >>> What disks are you using? Are they proper raid disks? A 12TB array can >>> have a soft read error every complete pass, and still be within the >>> disk-manufacturer's specs. If your disks are not raid-compliant, this >>> will stop your array from rebuilding, ever! >> >> All four are WD30EFRX-68EUZN0. They're not the cheapest WD disks, but >> they're also not the ones with the 5yr warranty. The last array I >> built using disks with 5yr warranty exceeded their capacity before the >> warranty expired. > > Umm, 1st google result showed this: > http://community.wd.com/t5/Desktop-Mobile-Drives/New-WD30EFRX-Red-Drive-Idle3-Timer-Set-to-8-Seconds-High-LCC-in/td-p/648821/page/5 I was really just looking for general input on RAID5 vs RAID6, but that is good information. I knew the drives weren't basic desktop drives and would be generally suitable for building a software RAID array. Are you familiar with the idle3 time? It appears the idle3-tools can be used to disable the idle3 timer entirely, which would disable parking the head at all, correct? > You might want to verify that setting before using in production, and > probably a quick search/read on any other issues. Perhaps I should have posted here prior to ordering the drives. Do you have any recommendations for 3TB SATA disks I should have used? > That depends on your requirements. What are the implications (for you) if > all the data is lost because two drives failed close to the same time? Is > that resulting cost more or less than getting a fourth drive and using > RAID6? I was hoping for some kind of emphatic NO, that it's a really bad idea. I'll consider it further, but probably choose RAID6 then anyway. > Take a look at BackupPC (on sourceforge). It is a "perl script" that uses > rsync plus hardlinks, but also does a whole lot more. It has worked very > well for me for a number of years. Okay, great. > Personally, I'm also still waiting for a more "stable" version of btrfs or > equivalent which can do block level de-dupe. Awesome, thanks. Alex -- 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
