software raid

[Paul Dwerryhouse]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 04:47:25PM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote:
> I suppose that is true; if the disk craps out then you would have some 
> programs crash without the raid1.  Typically though, disks crap out on 
> spin up, not while running, and a crash isn't a big deal as long as your 
> data is still intact. 

It's a big deal if you don't want to have to go and fix up a dead
computer at strange hours. If you don't get paid overtime for doing
this, then it's a real pain in the neck, and it's worth going to every
bit of trouble to keep the computers alive as long as possible, so that
you only need to fix them during working hours. On the other hand, if
you do get paid overtime, then it's in your employer's interest to not
have to pay the high rates that such a callout would incur - so, they'd
want mirrored swap too ;)

One of my PCs crashed just yesterday, from this very problem - for some
stupid reason, I hadn't mirrored the swap partition - instead I'd just
added two lots of swap (yet I had mirrored every other partition). A bad
block appeared on one of the drives and the computer crashed. Mirroring
it would have prevented this...

Cheers,

Paul

-- 
Paul Dwerryhouse				| PGP Key ID: 0x6B91B584
========================================================================
A look at Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5:
http://nepotismia.com/review/ubuntu/dapper_flight_5/