[ale] RAID, IDE and/or Linux

[James P. Kinney III]

Since you're not interested in speed, but in reliability, look at
software raid and a raid 1 mirroring arrangement. Writes will happen at
about the same the same speed as a normal write to a single hard drive,
but reads can happen a bit faster.

If one drive dies, you (root) get alerted. When the bad drive is
replaced, the software automatically mirrors the data onto the
replacement drive.

If this is to be a long-term archival of stuff to be never deleted, look
into setting the append only bit to the drive partition. That will add a
lock that prevents unintended deletions.

For "third drive" capability, make one of the mirror drives a pullout,
caddy-style and have two drives for the slot. Unmount the mirrored
partition, pull the drive and swap in the backup drive. Restarting the
mirroring software will bring the 3rd drive in sync with the first.

For off-site storage, you could look an rsync solution to keep a remote
drive in sync with the the raid system. This can be run from cron.

On Sat, 2002-02-16 at 10:21, David Corbin wrote:
> I'm contemplating setting up a "big file server" to act as storage for 
> all my "personal critical data".  This will include source control for 
> home projects, digital pictures, ripped CDs, digitized audio, and 
> perhaps even some video eventually - other stuff too, I'm sure.. 
>  Naturally, the server will run Linux. Because of the great volume of 
> data that will not be replaceable, I'm contemplating a RAID solution. 
>  This is for "backup and reliability", rather than for "speed".  I am 
> not so silly to think that this server will survive the rest of my life 
> as is, however it is my intent that this be a place to be data I wish to 
> keep the rest of my life.   However, I don't want to spend "lots" of 
> time administrating it, or doing maintenance every week.
> 
> The question for you folks is, what experiences do you have with Linux 
> doing RAID, or an IDE RAID controller that I can benefit from?
> 
> One thing I'm concerned about, is what happens when 2 years down the 
> road, one drive fails-  First, do I find out about this failure 
> immediately.  Second, what if I can't find an exact replacement for the 
> dead drive.  
> 
> There is an implied issue here.  If this data is that important to me, 
> I'll want to periodically make a copy for offsite.  To me, the best way 
> to do that these days is on another drive.  Is there a viable RAID 
> solution that will let me do this?  Can I have "3 equal drives", one of 
> which is only there occaisionally?
> 
> Thoughts and comments please.
> 
> David Corbin
> 
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and COO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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