[PLUG] RAID 1 suggestions

[Jeme A Brelin]

On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, Josh Orchard wrote:
> This lead me to think about running RAID 1 as a cheap backup.

Is this perfectly sound?  I mean, it seems to be and I do it on my home
fileserver, but I'm wondering if someone who knows a hell of a lot about
such things would just agree without caveat or if there's something that
should be taken into account.

> Does anyone know which is better?  Will the bios system give better
> support and be faster?  Will I even notice the difference?  I have
> priced a system that will do for my needs for around $500.  I could save
> a few dollars using MD but if the extra cash increases proformance I
> would spend the money.

Well, the intuitive response is that the hardware implementation will be
faster and less drain on system resources, but that really depends, I
suppose, on exactly which hardware and how it's implemented.

I use Linux MD (software raid) RAID1 on an old P166 for an NFS server
(serving /home to every other machine) at the house and I can't say that
it's given me even the tiniest bit of trouble.  It's a bit slower than a
single local disk, but I think that the network has a heck of a lot more
to do with that than the RAID.

Oh, and I've had power outages and all kinds of weird things happen in the
last few years with no obvious ill effects.  It's reiserfs on RAID1.

J.
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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