Which raid array do, or don't you use?

English Open Chat
1

I’m curious as to how many people are using RAID and which RAID setup… and why.

I’m using RAID 5 (3*1TB) myself as I feel that RAID 0 is a bit to expensive. (One entire disk lost, instead of 33.33%)
I do like having some redundancy, although I could most likely still download the content on it… given the size it would take quite a while.

The really vital things I got stored spread out over several computers… still a problem if the house burns down, but I got other problems to worry about if that happens.

2

Well that was the worst poll adding system I’ve ever seen.
Good that it doesn’t rely on javascript for adding more choices.

Bad that you can’t make it at the same time as the post, and only have 5 minutes to create it.

If some moderator could please add it with the following options:
**Title: ** Which RAID array do you have in use?

  1. None
  2. RAID 0
  3. RAID 1
  4. RAID 1 + 0
  5. RAID 0 + 1
  6. RAID 5
  7. Other (RAID 3/4/6/5+1 etc etc)
3

I think you meant RAID1. Striping isn’t redundancy.

I use software RAID1. I had considered RAID5, but I can’t justify the power consumption of that many disks, since I have my computer on and working all the time. So I live with 50% loss of capacity. The disks are nowhere near half-full even.

I have an offline portable disk for backup and also regular DVD backups of personal files. I really should look into storing some backups (perhaps encrypted) offsite since a house fire would destroy everything.

4

I did, or maybe I should just say I do all the time… as this is liked the millionth time I’ve made the same mistake.

Not too worried about the power usage as my RAID array really is just one big movie storagepoint. It rarely gets written to, and I only watch movies at the end of the day so I enabled AdvancedPM on all of the disks.

5

Axeia wrote:
> I’m curious as to how many people are using RAID and which RAID setup…
> and why.

I switched to standalone RAID subsystems.

They work with any OS… have hot swap… peace of mind.

Yes… you do pay extra for it… but I won’t go back.

I now have a fibre based SAN, 8x1TB…

If you just need a simple subsystem mirror (RAID 1), I like the araid
from http://www.accordancesystems.com Looks nice inside a box,
alerts you if there’s a problem (which I’ve never had one).

Might not be ultra fast, but it’s very reliable.

Obviously, if you can afford it, get a fibre based SAN, else,
you can try iSCSI instead. SANs today will easily saturate
your 2Gbps/4Gbps connections. Which is plenty fast.

Just my opinion. I’ve tried everything from software RAID, to
hardware-card RAID, to SCSI DAS subsystems… and now Fibre SAN
subsystems.

It’s like when people move from an inkjet to a color laser…
you’ll never go back.

6

Hi
I use to have a RAID1 setup on the main workstation, I brought a
Linksys NAS-200 a few months ago and pulled two of the 250GB drives out
of the desktop and moved them over there and run RAID1 (xfs fs). I’m at
about 60% so will probably look at getting some 500/1TB drives in the
near future.

Now I can just add the cifs share into the fstab and away it goes.

Also as it’s (NAS) got a media server I can fire up the xbox360 and can
watch video’s, look at photos and listen to music with out too many
issues :wink:

The solaris machine has a tape drive so can shut that down and do a ufs
dump to tape and send that off with the other half to work. I also have
a spare 80GB drive to use for important stuff which lives with the
tapes.

Once I recover the 250GB drives they will become the off-site storage
medium. It’s really the photos/videos that are the real important ones
for us…

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.1 (i586) Kernel 2.6.27.19-3.2-pae
up 2 days 1:48, 2 users, load average: 0.05, 0.15, 0.17
ASUS eeePC 1000HE ATOM N280 1.66GHz | GPU Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME