What a good two port stata raid 1 pci controller

[Preston Hagar]

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:
> jgarciaitlist at gmail.com wrote:
>
> What a good two port stata raid 1 pci controller supported with drivers
> under ubuntu?
>
> Use Linux software raid.  It has been very thoroughly debugged, is high
> performance, is flexible, and is cheap.
>
>

I completely agree.

> Six general warnings about raid:
>
> 1) When running raid 1, do not use exactly matched disks in a single raid 1
> pair.  The two identical disks living identical lives might die in quick
> succession when they both wear out.  If instead you have disks from
> different manufacturers, chances are one will be less well made than the
> other and die first.
>

In general not a terrible idea.  It is also nice to have a hotspare if
you can afford an extra disk.

> 2) If a disk dies replace it immediately!  High priority!  High priority!
>
> 3) If you can, replace your disks before they finally quit working.  Disks
> keep internal "smart" statistics on their health, you can look at these with
> smartctl, I don't know whether Ubuntu currently watches these for you and
> warns...  (Anybody?)  Try to get your disks staggered: for example, if they
> are both getting old, replace the one that is worst off according to
> smartctl, then maybe 9-months later, replace the other disk; now you have a
> staggered pair.
>

Ubuntu, to my knowledge, doesn't watch these for you.  I would highly
recommend Hard Disk Sentinel:

http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel_linux.php

What it does is take the SMART attributes and uses an algorithm they
designed (it is explained on their site) to calculate a health
percentage 0-100%.  The problem with SMART is that a lot of attributes
are all or nothing.  As long as they are above a threashold specificed
by the manufacturer, then no SMART alert/error will be given by
smartctl.  With hd sentinel, it takes the attributes that aren't
perfect, but are still are above the threshold (like say bad sectors)
and averages that in to give an overall estimate of disk health.  It
is a free program with with the -solid option can be easily
incorporated into a script for monitoring (I wrote a nagios plugin for
my needs)

All the rest was good advice, I just wanted to mention hard disk
sentiel (not affiliated with them in any way, I just like the product
a lot).

Preston