David Haller said the following on 04/12/2011 11:35 AM:
I HAVE differently sized disks. How to have a sane RAID thingy across those without going bonkers? I'd be real happy if you'd come up with a good idea!
That's a very good point, David, and is the great shortcoming of RAID s RAID, as opposed to the "Raid" subsystems that are available from some commercial (read closed source) vendors. Being in a similar situation, I use LVM. I'm experimenting with Btrfs. RAID users keep one drive spare. In effect I do too, but its spread across all the other drives so I can make the best use of striping. I can also "mirror" file systems :-) My real problem is that many of my drives are older and I only have four slots on the motherboard and one us used by the CD/DVD drive. So new drives are going to be SATA, or I need to get a disk driver board. I've had couple of drives go bad. One was on a server that had been running for over 2 years when I shut it down to go on an extended vacation. On my return it crashed, irrecoverably ... as in head-gouging. I'm told that's a known failure mode if you don't shut down or "park the head" on some drives. The other was a slow decay. Increasing loss of sectors. Predicted death imminent. I added a drive and did a pvmove. The nice thing about a pvmove is that you can restart it if it is interrupted by a crash. Before you raise the matter, yes I do have a log-watcher and one of its patterns to look for is things that may be or become disk problems Things like smartd[3332]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], 39 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors smartd[3332]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 157 to 171 -- "I think there is a world market for about five computers." Thomas J. Watson, chairman of the board of IBM, 1943 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org