On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 18:14:15 -0500, Paul Tomblin <ptomblin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm not sure I agree with the suggestion about RAID. If the drives > are failing because of age then when one fails, you're going to have > to replace them all. But frankly, I don't believe that they're dying > of age - I've had drives last for over 3 years with 24 hour a day > usage with only one or two reboots. I work in a data centre; it's exceedingly rare for more than a single disk in an array to fail at a given time. That being said, I have seen situations where a single disk in a RAID 5 array has failed, and when the disk was replaced, another disk failed due to the age of the disk and the increased load caused by the resync operation. That's why backups are important. Nonetheless, RAID offers a level of minimal protection that you just can't achieve by hopin' and prayin' nothing ever goes wrong with that single disk that has all your important stuff on it. :-) Storage is like security -- layers of protection. A journalling filesystem, redundant disks, and backups are only parts of the equation, none of them is sufficient in and of itself. -- Ben Steeves _ bcs@xxxxxxxxxx The ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) ben.steeves@xxxxxxxxx against HTML e-mail X GPG ID: 0xB3EBF1D9 http://www.metacon.ca/bcs / \ Yahoo Messenger: ben_steeves
