Corrupted Drive

[Ben Steeves]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 18:14:15 -0500, Paul Tomblin <ptomblin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure I agree with the suggestion about RAID.  If the drives
> are failing because of age  then when one fails, you're going to have
> to replace them all.  But frankly, I don't believe that they're dying
> of age - I've had drives last for over 3 years with 24 hour a day
> usage with only one or two reboots.

I work in a data centre; it's exceedingly rare for more than a single
disk in an array to fail at a given time.  That being said, I have
seen situations where a single disk in a RAID 5 array has failed, and
when the disk was replaced, another disk failed due to the age of the
disk and the increased load caused by the resync operation.  That's
why backups are important.

Nonetheless, RAID offers a level of minimal protection that you just
can't achieve by hopin' and prayin' nothing ever goes wrong with that
single disk that has all your important stuff on it. :-)

Storage is like security -- layers of protection.  A journalling
filesystem, redundant disks, and backups are only parts of the
equation, none of them is sufficient in and of itself.

-- 
Ben Steeves                     _                    bcs at metacon.ca
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