DANGER!!! Problems with 10.04 installer (RAID devices *will* get corrupted)

[Karl Larsen]

On 04/23/2010 09:34 AM, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> On 04/23/2010 08:03 AM, Karl Larsen wrote:
>    
>>            I will never use raid because I am not running a server. But
>> even if I was I would back up the server every night using cron. It is
>> the only thing to do if you have important data.  People on this list
>> have real pain when there hard drive fails (or the RAID5 system acts up)
>> and I feel their pain but it can be solved ONLY by a real back up.
>>      
> Doing backups would be the right thing to do because RAID is NOT a
> backup solution. It is a fault-tolerance and in some cases, a
> performance solution. With the right hardware and the right
> configuration, RAID enables your machine to continue working even after
> a drive, two in some configurations, fails and again with the same
> criteria, you can get better performance. That is essential for servers
> that must have high availability or special needs like having fast
> database read times. If you have a hot swap device, you can replace the
> defective drive without powering down and the RAID set will rebuild.
> Performance during the rebuild will be reduced but lower performance
> usually is better than being off-line. Before the dead drive in the RAID
> set has been replaced and during that rebuild process, you have a
> vulnerability window in most RAID configurations where failure of one
> more drive will break the RAID set. That's why it's important to have
> spare drives on hand to replace the failed drives as soon as possible.
>
> Someone mentioned using SATA drives for RAID. Beware. Many, perhaps
> most, of the consumer grade SATA drives aren't suitable for using in
> RAID. The drive manufacturers have made firmware changes that prevent
> them from being used in RAID configurations, apparently. Western
> Digital, for example, has their consumer drives, which have three year
> warranties, and their "professional" drives, which have five year
> warranties. The pro drives are at least double the cost of the consumer
> drives but they're RAID-certified and have different firmware. I have no
> idea what happens if you use a consumer drive in a RAID configuration.
> It might work but not optimally.
>    
         I am using one SATA hard drive that is now 6 years old, about. 
It still works and I see no reason for it to fail. And it has the same, 
except the serial cable, working speed as my older IDE drives like on my 
portable 160GB device that I back this up onto.

      If the RAID device can't use SATA it is likely because the RAID 
device has 50 pin data cables!


73 Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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