[PLUG] Reliable storage on a shoestring

[Evan Heidtmann]

On Sat, 2005-08-06 at 21:28 -0700, Aaron Burt wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 06, 2005 at 09:11:58PM -0700, Evan Heidtmann wrote:
> > This leads to a more specific question: in what way are my drives likely
> > to fail? Will they throw up a red flag saying "I'm dead, replace me", or
> > will they be less straightforward about it and start flipping bits in my
> > data? 
> 
> Drives almost always fail two ways: slow decay (more and more unreadable
> sectors) or catastrophic (won't do nuthin'.)  Either way, silent data
> corruption doesn't happen.

That's very good to hear. It appears that old drives did silent
corruption, but new drives don't. All my drives are relatively new, so I
should be fine there.

> Modern IDE drives have a thingy called SMART for monitoring drive
> health.  You can install SMARTd, which will keep an eye on it.

Thanks for the tip. I will definitely use that.

I am attracted to RAID 1 because of the simplicity, but RAID 5 would
give me more redundant storage at the expense of some non-redundant
storage. In my situation, with 2x 120GB and 1x 250GB, what do you
recommend?

Also, is it a good idea to boot on SW-RAID? It can be done, but is it
wise?

Thanks again for your help,
Evan

> 
> 
> Aaron, who doesn't miss MFM, RLL or ESDI *at* *all*.

I'm too much of a whippersnapper to know what those mean, but I probably
don't miss them either :-)