Re: Install and RAID
On Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 04:18:21PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
> RAID is far less important, in my mind, than a journaling fs. The purpose of
> RAID is to ensure that hardware failure doesn't result in downtime. But in my
> experience, your average "workstation for a person who does important work"
> suffers much less downtime and data loss from hard drive detonation than from
> unexpected power outages. Many of the problems RAID is intended to solve
> can also be dealt with by throwing more hardware at the problem (SCSI disks
> with lower failure rates and higher access speeds, or hardware RAID
> controllers). OTOH, there's no hardware solution that solves the problems
> posed by the lack of a journaling filesystem.
I think you're off base on the purpose of software raid and of
journalling filesystems. Even if you don't have an uptime requirement,
you might still want your data--and the cost of a second hd is
significantly less than the cost of any backup solution I'm aware of.
No, software raid doesn't help with accidental deletion or fs
corruption, but I've lost enough hd's to want insurance against that
problem. As for jfs's, they do *not* prevent data loss from power
failures, they merely avoid the necessity of fscking on reboot. Any data
not finally committed to the disk *will be lost* on power failure, jfs
or not. If that's a problem for you, get a ups.
That said, I'd support raid as an option, but not as a default.
--
Mike Stone
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