Hello, sorry for my delay On Tue, 12 Apr 2011, Anton Aylward wrote:
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.
I'm not so sure about the latter ;)
Being in a similar situation, I use LVM. I'm experimenting with Btrfs.
I like what zfs claims to do.
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 :-)
I like it simple, best, if I could use a rescue-system with a hex-editor to repair a broken system[1]. LVM over RAID is just a "no-no" in my mind. What I need a backup of, I mirror via rsync locally to another drive and/or to a drive in the other box. The rest is redundant (at different levels) anyway, e.g. DVD .iso, dvdrip-rips, and resulting reencoded files.
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.
Get a GA-770TA-UD3 if you're using AMD AM2+/AM3 CPUs ;) And yes, I know your dilemma, I've used a Athlon 500 on a MSI MS-6167 MoBo until last October or so (BIOS dated: 1999). I had 4 disks in that thing (since ~'00, last was 1120GB, IDE only), also a Promise Ultra 33 at times, and the PCI-SATA-Controller worked but hung up the box _hard_ when other PCI-traffic was occurring. I guess it were the ISA Sound- or SCSI-Card that confused the Controller (in the other box (the one with the MA770), that same SATA- Controller works nicely and reliably).
I've had couple of drives go bad.
Depending on the number of drives involved ... to be expected :(
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.
*OUCH* I guess that's why SUSE runs a 'hdparm -y' on drives on shutdown since a while ago.
The other was a slow decay. Increasing loss of sectors.
I "phase out" disks once they report any defective sectors. They'll get used for "scrap space" and whatever, but not anything even remotely worth a backup.
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.
man rsync ;) Maybe not quite as efficient as pvmove.
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
*ouch* replace ASAP or use just as a temp-dev (somewhat like a RAM-Disk, but a bit more persistent, or something like that ;)
smartd[3332]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 157 to 171
I have a root-xterm running, with an 'tail -f' on /v/l/m (and more). -dnh [1] once you recreated an EPBR from scratch[2] from surrounding data (i.e. the MBR and the first logical partition and the following EPBR) with assembler and INT13 with DOS debug.com, you tend to like that "simplicity" ;) [2] was completely overwritten with 0xF6 by some partitioning (IIRC Cnegvgvba Zntvp) tool being confused -- So Linus, what are we doing tonight? The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org