[ale] raid suggestions

Erik Mathis erik at mathists.com
Thu Feb 9 16:26:01 EST 2012


That was a pretty good read. I think it missed some pro's for hardraid
(hardraid not being some microcenter raid card). Maybe the biggest one
imho is that when a drive fails in some remote office, you can simply
send out a new drive from your pile of spares and the local "Johnny
the windows guy" can just remove the drive with the amber light on it
and slide in the new one. BAM! the volume is rebuilding.
No need to log into the box and
remove it from softraid (mdadm /dev/md0 -r /dev/sda1)
remove drive from the scsi controller (echo "remove-single-drive 0 0 0
1" > /proc/scsi/scsi
Then reverse that process (and hope it works)
Thus freeing my self up doing more important things.

To me the raid question is answered though efficiency and stability,
not the most geekiest solution.

Also to either stop or start the flaming, most all the cons made in
that article can also effect directly, or indirectly softraid.

Now to contradict myself. If you don't use a standard server build;
black box like IBM or Dell etc.. softraid is the way to go as most of
the cons from that article do apply. BUT if you stick with standard
server build and patch it like you would patch your software. you are
pretty safe. In the end, imho raid is the last attempt to save your
self from restoring from backups. Also raid wont save you from FS
corruption either or someone doing something really bad (rm -rf /).

Also the "SPOF" with respect to disks/controllers is crap. Its the
same problem regardless of which card you plug your drives into. Also
the whole organic raid upgrade is just dumb and doesn't reflect
reality, do you guys really have the time to rebuild all your arrays
each time some new hotness comes around?

-Erik-

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net> wrote:
> There's a nice page about software versus hardware RAID by Jeff Garzik.
>
>  http://linux.yyz.us/why-software-raid.html
>
> On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Lightner, Jeff <JLightner at water.com> wrote:
>> Hardware based (for true RAID) because it doesn't require CPU cycles.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Calvin Harrigan
>> Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2012 3:26 PM
>> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
>> Subject: Re: [ale] raid suggestions
>>
>> As per a discussion on the list a few months ago, software based raid 10..
>>
>> On 2/9/2012 2:54 PM, Geoffrey Myers wrote:
>>> I've not played with raid stuff of late.  What is the recommended
>>> configuration for a small business these days?  Definitely want data
>>> protection, but don't want to sacrifice a lot of speed for that purpose..
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>
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>
> --
>   Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>
>   http://noserose.net/e/
>   http://www.coraid.com/
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