Re: SCSI Disk/Controller advice please - fun

From: Alvin Oga (aoga_at_ns.Linux-Consulting.com)
Date: 10/30/04

  • Next message: H. S.: "Re: /dev/hdc? and changing drive letters"
    Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 18:11:59 -0700 (PDT)
    To: Joao Clemente <jpcl@rnl.ist.utl.pt>
    
    

    hi ya

    On Sat, 30 Oct 2004, Joao Clemente wrote:

    >
    > ?!? What if a drive fails while on those 12h/day where people are
    > actually using them? This will be a fileserver where documents are
    > constantly changed/added/removed during the work hours!

    have 2 file servers ...

    - your fans is more likely to die than the disk
    - the ethernet cable will be wiggled loose while you're on vacation
             - when a fan dies.. you're dead ... everything will die too
            - when a power supply fan dies, its a matter of months before your
            cpu, memory, disks, power spply( days ) to all start to die
            ( its fun to see people wonder why their system dies when the ps
            ( fan is dead ..

            always put 3-4 extra fans in the regular midtower box

    - lots of ways for things to fail ... disks being the least of the
      problems if you bought good stuff from known-good reliable stores

    > Well, I never used it before, I tought it was somewhat smarter... like
    > "mirror UNTIL a drive goes bad. At that point stop mirroring, ignore
    > failed drive, alert someone"

    data is written to disk1 ... and mirror to disk2/..

    but if disk2's disk sector arrives under the head first, it is written
    first and mirrored to disk1 later when disk1 is not bz

    - it's a 2 way mirror
            - how does the systme know that the file is bad/corrupted, vs
            the file you did mean to erase on both disks
            ( tricky stuff ... though it can be done when one is careful )

    > I see your point. Very good point!

    sw monitoring is trivial .. monitor anything and everything till you're
    blue and tired of monitoring it
     
    > How diferent is a "every minute" cronjob rsync'ing content in both
    > drives to RAID1 (regarding the problem you stated above): "bad info"
    > gets sync'ed to the good disk anyway... doesn't it?

    manually doing 2 way mirroring is too whacky ... and non-trivial

    murphy's law says your primary disk will die ... if you do 1-way mirror
     
    > A drive failure may lock the whole disk array?

    no ... it's not supposed to

    when you first build the raid system ..

            - pull each disk out one at a time while its rwritting a 2GB file
            and see if survives and does finish mirroring the file its
            supposed to be saving

            - you'd be doing these test to simulate disk failures
            and if you spent too much time to fix it... the others in the
            office will say why bother with raid, it didn't work
            and hopefully, the bean counters willg ive you another $100 to get
            a new disk to put on a different pc to backup and save to a 2nd
            disk that probably will not fail for the same reason that the
            other disk died
                    - disks doesn't die nicely, it dies abruptly and randomly

            - there's lots of under-utilized pc in the office to save data
            onto

    c ya
    alvin

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  • Next message: H. S.: "Re: /dev/hdc? and changing drive letters"

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