Re: IDE ATA RAID under Linux
hi ya jenny
On Tue, 6 May 2003, jennyw wrote:
> On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 04:17:35PM -0700, nate wrote:
> > they worked ok, though any time a disk failed the system would kernel
> > panic(reiserfs would panic). And I had a lot of disk failures, probably
>
> I've heard more people mention 3ware favorably than other vendors, but
> this makes me a little concerned ... a kernel panic isn't exactly what
> I was hoping for in the case of a drive failure! ;-) Does anyone have
> any idea if current 3ware cards/drivers are better?
a good/properly raid box will NOT fail if a disk died .. that is the
whole point of raid
- reiserfs is a little too far on the bleeding edge as i can
make it crash ( on demand ) on some setups just running x11
hardware raid ...
- dont have to muck around with "recovery"
- but you have to make sure your hw is supported by the kernel
list of hardware raid controllers
http://www.linux-ide.org/chipsets.html
http://www.1u-raid5.net/HW/hw.txt
software raid ... is good because
- its saves you the costs of the hardware raid controllers
- easy, simple, inexpensive ... works like a charm
http://www.1u-raid5.net/HowTo/SW-Raid-HOWTO.txt
> Also, some IDE RAID manufacturers (e.g. Promise) list specific Linux
> distributions that they support. Just wondering if this means getting
> them to run under Debian would be a real challenge or not recommended.
do NOT use promise Fast-track raid series .. or at least if you
do, backup your data elsewhere
> I originally thought I'd go with 3ware, but the reseller I work with say
> that they aren't necessarily compatible with a lot of the hotswap bays
3ware is an "inexpensive" raid solutions for running under linux
since they allow yu to use ide disks instead of real scsi disks
> that are out there (as opposed to Promise or Adaptec). You mentioned
> that 3ware has drive cages but when I checked out their site it seems
> that they only have one option (4 bays, $200). I'm currently looking at
if you want ot do hot swapping, do lots of testing to confirm that
your reading and writing can in fact survice a disk hot swap w/o hiccuping
and burping
> doing just mirroring (I'm choosing hardware over software RAID only to
> reduce complexity in the case of a recovery -- someone please let me
> know if I'm really wrong about this!). The main reason for getting RAID
for mirroring ( on 2 disks )... use software raid1
> is to protect against data loss due to drive failure; uptime would be
> nice, but that's not a priority right now (this is a low budget
> operation).
if you want to protect data against data lost from a drive failure,
backup the data to a different server ...
raid will NOT protect you if the disk drive died due to
bad power, bad memory, rogue cpu, etc..etc..
- you learn the hard way ... ( we had bad memory, that kept
"fixing" the disks with its bad memory content )
raid1 mirroring will only help you if you cannot afford to be offline
while you fix the dead disk problem
-- with 2 disks... you will go offline as soon as your
disk is being fixed ...
-- if you do NTO fix your bad disk asap, you're running in
degraded mode, and there is no duplicate data of those new
data since you're no longer in mirroring mode after a disk failure
> The Arco IDE solution looks good too because to the OS an array will
> appear as a normal IDE disk. Any thoughts on that?
that holds true for 3ware too
-- pull the cables and power on those drives anytime, and if you
can survive those problems.. you've got a good raid setup
have fun raiding
c ya
alvin
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