hard drive config suggestions

[Joost Waversveld]

----- Bericht van jep at obrien-pifer.com ---------
    Datum: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 13:14:02 -0400
      Van: James Pifer <jep at obrien-pifer.com>
Antwoorden aan:For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Onderwerp: hard drive config suggestions
      Aan: Fedora <fedora-list at redhat.com>


> Last week I was out of town and we had a bad electrical storm. My
> systems are on their own small UPSes, but that's more for short bursts,
> not sustained outages. Anyway, I ended up losing two systems. One
> apparently got something corrupted and would not boot, but I could get
> to the files through a rescue CD. Not a big deal since I wanted to move
> it to new hardware anyway.
>
> The other one had a WD 160GB hard drive fail. The good news it is under
> warranty. The bad news is it was part of a LVM with another 160 and 120
> drive. So I'm going to have to rebuild the whole thing. It was running a
> couple important things, but mostly was used for backing up my mythtv
> recordings and videos, music, pictures, etc.
>
> So, on to my question. It's a real hassle to go through this when
> ATA/EIDE drives fail, and it seems like they fail a lot nowadays. I have
> quite a few of these drives so I'm not looking to purchase anything
> else, like SATA. So I'm wondering should I try doing some type of RAID5
> with these drives?
>
> If so I'd want to put 4 of them in it, which then leads me to an
> installation issue since the CDROM would be removed. If I did RAID5 I
> would need to try and boot off a USB stick and do the install off NFS.
> Not sure if this system will even boot off USB. NFS install is not a
> problem.
>
> But am I helping myself all that much? I can't guarantee the power thing
> right now. I have some Belkin UPSes (F6H500-SER) but have yet to get
> them working with Linux.
>
> If I have a power failure while running RAID5 are may chances any better
> that it will come back up ok?
>
> I assume there's some type of notification to root if a drive fails?
> How difficult is it to replace it and have the array rebuild?
>
> Any sugestions or comments?
>
> Thanks,
> James
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> fedora-list at redhat.com
> To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>


----- Einde bericht van jep at obrien-pifer.com -----

Just for the information, the minimum number of drives for RAID5 is three, so
you do not have to remove your CD Drive.

RAID 5 is good in keeping your data safe, it is a good start but it is not
foolproof.... You're still have the chance to loose your data, so make 
backups!

Greetings,

Joost