On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Tero Pesonen <mlist-suse@tpesonen.net> wrote:
Of course, a RAID won't help against other kinds of data loss, such as the power supply's failing and killing other components with some mighty spike; or from fire, or flood, or what ever. That is OK. That's why I backup.
Are you using a UPS?
In other words, may I combine disks from different manufacturers, with different specs, etc. without affecting the RAID somehow negatively?
It is OK to mix manufacturers and capacities. It is good to mix discs with different manufacture dates. This makes it less likely that the discs will fail at the same time. But I would not mix buses, spindle speed or cache size because I would not want to thrash one disc while leaving the other one idle. So, while you can mix discs, I bought an identical pair of hard discs for my RAID 1. Using a pair of identical discs takes the guesswork out of building a RAID. And I am satisfied with the result.
On the other hand, replacing disks later with larger capacity ones will cause no problem as they only need to meet the minimum size criterion. Hence, I could replace them one-by-one such that each new disk, replacing a removed old one, is first let to fully integrate/reconstruct; finally, after all disk have been replaced, I could enlarge a partition or two, for example, as allowed by the new shared minimum, thus increasing the capacity of the virtual device that is being RAIDed.
Remember to back up before experimenting. You might want to look at using LVM rather than expanding partitions. My System I have a three disc system. I have one disc for the OS. And I have a matched pair of Seagates in a RAID 1. The OS disc is a throwaway disc. In other words, if something happens to it, I can just buy a new disc, build a new install of openSuSE and be on my way. I have no personal data on that disc. All of my data is on the RAID 1. And I have a separate mount point for my stuff that does not overlap with any standard Linux mount point such as /home or whatever. So the biggest risks to my data are a double hardware failure or operator error. I also have a removable hard drive with the same capacity as my RAID that I use for backing up. Mike -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org