Yes, yes RAID 1.... Mirrored, not striped. Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. All of my other servers are RAID5 as data is so important to the company. I learnt the hard way when a disk failed on a RAID5'ed Win2K server the true value of redundancy. Perhaps I should have explained the reason for h/w RAID over s/w RAID. I would like (although it is not an absolute requirement) to be able to Ghost off an image periodically. As the OS is providing RAID in s/w RAID, and to get Ghost32 up and running I have to boot off a custom PE disk, I would need RAID at the h/w level. That said, comments on flaky drivers are starting to worry me. Should I can the Ghost idea and rely on tarring/dumping to a Samba share on another server? That way I could use s/w RAID and avoid sketchy drivers. Finally - SCSI or IDE? I can't imagine that fast disk access is going to be a priority - comments?? Thanks for all your advice so far _ (\o/) H /_\ On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 08:18, John Andersen wrote:
On Wednesday 01 September 2004 12:47 am, Henry Standing wrote:
Hardware-RAID0'ED SCSI disks 1GB RAM
Raid0 - - as in ZERO? NO, that's just wrong on so many levels.....
Raid 0 just _increases_ your chance of data loss by the number of disks you have. (Loss of any 1 disk can cost you the whole array).
Go raid 1 or raid 5. Either will run right thru a single disk failure. Throw in a hot spare, and the system will probably recover from the failure before you even know it happened.
And at least evaluate software raid. Its not dependent on late arriving and often flaky controller drivers. (There are still reports of raid controller problems in SuSE 9.1).
I've been using software raid for about 5 years now and I really like it. Due to a power surge I had to replace one of the disks, and the software worked perfectly. Yes, it takes a tad more cpu power, but never exceeds 1% cpu on some pretty wimpy hardware. Software raid also allows you to mix scsi and IDE devices.