RAID

[Phillip Susi]

Good point.  When that server at work crapped itself, the first thing we 
did was plug the drives in another machine to see if we could recover 
the data.  It was a complete no-go.  Then we ordered a replacement raid 
card and had it shipped overnight, and that didn't help either.  Had the 
same strange thing happened with md it would have been easy to get it 
mounting again since the md metadata is well known, the proprietary 
stuff wasn't.

Of course, if you have tons of money to burn, instead of throwing it all 
into the fireplace you can buy a second card in advance to have sitting 
around waiting just in case.  That would help with hardware failure, but 
in this instance, the hardware was fine, it had just hosed up it's 
metadata on the disks.

'Forum Post wrote:
> You are absolutely right. SW Raid prevents losing data in case 
> 
> of hardware (Promise / mainboard) defect. One can take the hdd 
> 
> out and drop it in another machine to pull them out. 
> 
> 
> 
> Otherwise you have to dig in EBay for a similar device to start
> rescue.
> 
> 
> 
> But: After all thinking about how's if's and the like I admit that 
> 
> a good additional backup strategie lets admin sleep better.
> 
>