lost everything?

[Thorsten Jungblut]

Hi,

> I had a 4 disk pata RAID0 with 1 sata spare.
> The 4 disk pata array was made using 2 PCI card, 2 drives per card.
> It seems that one of the cards was loose, and so I lost 2 drives at once.
> Please tell me I haven't just lost everything on the array...

If a card is lost, that doesn't mean the drives are defect now? You only 
need to get a new card? If thats true, no data is lost at all, you just 
can not access it until you get a new card.

If one DRIVE fails, all data in a RAID0 is lost.

A spare disk doesn't make sense for RAID0 since if a drive fails, the 
array contents are lost and there is nothing that can be written to the 
spare disk!

Consider using a RAID5 over all disks without a spare. A RAID5 can handle 
a single disk failure without data loss.

A RAID5 consisting of n disks has n-1 the capacity of a single disk, the 
same as a RAID0 with a "spare".

Or use RAID0+1. A RAID0+1 consisting of n disks has the capacity of n/2 
disks but it can handle a single disk failure and in some cases even more 
disk failures depending on what disks fail.

Viele Grüsse,
Thorsten

-- 
Thorsten Jungblut
Universität Koblenz, Fachbereich Informatik
 http://www.netcorner.org/