[TriLUG] Setting Up RAID-5

[Brian Henning]

Lee Fickenscher wrote:
> On Dec 8, 2006, at 12:06 AM, Brian Henning wrote:
>> <snip>
>> I didn't think of that straight away, but the easy solution would be 
>> to have
>> the OS not stored on the array.  Separate itty-bitty cheap HD for the OS.
>> If it dies, who cares.  Reinstall.  Uptime is my bottom-most concern;
>> throughput (on read moreso than write) and data integrity/safety are 
>> top, in
>> that order.
>>
>> <snip>
>> Yeah, but as I said in #1 above, uptime isn't nearly so big a 
>> concern.  If
>> the machine crashes, oops.  I don't imagine ever writing "live" to the 
>> array
>> (meaning any critical write operations, such as writing while sounds are
>> being recorded, will be to the workstation, then backed up to the RAID --
>> system crashes during write during backup, just copy the file again), 
>> and a
>> crash during a read would be a nuisance but less of a nuisance than 
>> losing
>> all the data.  It's not like a sudden-death crash is going to 
>> (hopefully) be
>> any more frequent than the sudden-death itself.
> 
> If uptime and performance aren't really a concern, why even bother with 
> raid?
> Just get yourself a good backup solution and use LVM to maximize space.

Two reasons:
1) Throughput, particularly on read.  Striping across several disks 
means I can move more than one drive's max data rate at once (right?). 
Less time waiting for 500MB of samples to load into my softsynth.
2) The geekly chest hair.  "Yeah, that sucker's got gigabit ethernet, a 
gig of RAM, and a 800GB RAID-5! *tim-allen-esque grunt grunt grunt*" :-D

Cheers,
~Brian


-- 
----------------
Brian A. Henning
strutmasters.com
336.597.2397x238
----------------