[TriLUG] SATA and Linux RAID

[Joel Ebel]

It depends on your goal.  What are you trying to prevent here.  This is 
the classic RAID vs backup scenario.  If you are trying to protect 
against accidental file deletion, then a nightly rsync is better. 
That's a backup solution.  If you are trying to protect from hardware 
failure, then set up software RAID 1.  It's not hard to do.  Just check 
out the Linux Software RAID HOWTO.  Many distributions allow you to set 
it up easily during the install.  If the data is important, you really 
need both.  So go with the software RAID, and look into an external 
backup solution as well.

And I'd have to recommend linux software RAID over the RAID built into 
many chipsets.  The software RAID is much easier to monitor, maintain, 
and recover from.

Joel

Dean Price wrote:
> I am preparing to build a Linux SMB file server
> 
> the OS will go on the IDE drive
> two 250GB SATA drives will be used for the data
> 
> The shop this box is going into will be closed (no work) over night.
> 
> My question is this
> 
> Would it be best ( more effiecient ) to create a linux raid mirror with 
> the two drives.
> 
> or
> 
> set the drives up static (sda1 and sdb1) and create a cron job the will 
> dd sda to sdb.
> 
> Thoughts and comments please.
>