How to create a terabyte storage array?

[Anders Karlsson]

On 12/1/05, Zach <uid000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think I might not have conveyed my original point very well.  Some
> posters are very defensive of raid and may mistakenly believe that I
> was discounting as a potential solution.

I apologise if I came across as overly brusque and defensive. I am
guilty of not conveying my point clearly enough as well.

> All I was really trying to say (somewhat clumsily) was that what a
> raid setup protects you you from that any other solution (LVM, JBOD,
> single disk) combined with regular backups doesn't is downtime in the
> event of a physical disk failure, since you can rebuild the array from
> parity (assuming you have a replacement disk) without having to do a
> complete restore.

RAID protects you from disc failure - not from yourself. ;-) I should
have adviced the original poster to use a hot spare as well, but that
is just me being overcautious and I am not running with a hot spare in
my server so am not the one to give advice on that.

> I just wanted to suggest that for some users, the time it takes to
> restore from backup to get the data back may not be a problem, and
> might be worth the almost mindless simplicity of setting up LVM.

Very true. And most of the time, I would agree with you on this, as an
ordinary user would not have more data than what mould fit on a single
tape (AIT). When you start talking 1TB of storage to the user(s), you
are in a different ballgame though.

> Personally I am a raid user (though not at the moment) and I think
> various raid configuration s have some pretty neat implications.  I
> just wanted add another idea that may be viable in some circumstances.
>  Sorry for any confusion.

No worries, all sides of the problem should be highlighted. You did
that well. :)

--
Anders Karlsson <trudheim at gmail.com>