[K12OSN] RAID let me down...

[Eric Harrison]

Shawn Powers wrote:
> I had one of my hard drives fail in a hardware RAID5 array this 
> morning.  Along with the drive failure, I have thousands, maybe hundreds 
> of thousands of file corruptions, missing inodes, etc, etc.  I've been 
> fscking all morning.  So much for fault tolerance.
> 
> My question to the list, is should I switch to a software based array?  
> I use software RAID5 at home, and apart from figuring out *which* drive 
> is "drive 4", I've been able to replace a bad drive without any real 
> headaches.
> 
> Any suggestions on what I should do next?  Apart from quitting my job 
> and applying at McDonalds...
> 
> -Shawn


Yesterday I worked on a software RAID5 that blew chunks. No permanent 
damage, but it did not fail gracefully - the bad drive hung the SCSI 
bus. I had to do a manual fsck after power-cycling. It *could* have been 
bad.

Backups, backups are good ;-)

-Eric