-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Tuesday 2008-09-23 at 12:27 +0200, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
No because I've already "been there" and "done that" -- It is IMPOSSIBLE to recover a RAID-1 array that just one day (after properly shutting down the system and not having hardware failures) decided not to boot.
Ahhh, now this is interesting :) The main reason I was creating the RAID1 array was so that if one drive failed, I could receive a message from mdadm, swop out the bad drive and continue working, without losing data.
Of course you can continue. You can even have a third disk as active spare and the system will switch over to it without downtime. It was only Andrew who had some problem, which at the moment is not fully clear what it was.
In view of the above comment, I guess it is time I ordered the 3rd HDD and rather setup RAID5.
You could have the same type of problem. Both raid 1 and raid 5 can withstand the failure of a single disk without downtime, with different approaches. It will depend on the hardware of course, whether you can replace the disk "hot".
HW RAID cards are a MAJOR expense for a home hobbyist who just likes to make sure their data is retrievablein the event of a HDD crash.
In fact, I don't think you need raid at all. Raid is for minimizing the downtime to zero, for systems that have to be accessible full time. That is not usually the case for home, unless you want to experiment. IMO it is safer to have that second disk as a full backup, updated at least daily via rsync. The backup has an advantage: you can recover from a software crash or finger error: the other disk is not mounted, so nothing is written to it "yet". On a raid, both copies would have the same wrong data. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkjY20UACgkQtTMYHG2NR9XOewCcCDKNRt1EUiB6atlYNqw0NHp7 OzsAoIVbipCGYRXIRrBkE5Y+82aVOzVy =FMRS -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org