Re: file systems

On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 01:29:09PM -0600, Greg Oster wrote:
>
> It buys much when a drive dies late on a Sunday night and you've got stuff
> you're wanting to work on for Monday morning :) No, it's not a
> substitute for backups, but it's really nice to not have to wait till
> the next day to go buy a big disk cause all the little ones you have
> arn't big enough to restore your data to :) That, and who wants to
> spend hours recovering from backups? :)

I think most of my profs would have told me I shouldn't have waited until
Sunday night to do the work :)

Like I said, in a high availability scenario, I'd agree. For my desktop,
the weighted cost of accepting the risk of downtime (and recovering from
backup) is less than buying another drive. I've never found disaster
recovery from backup to be that big a deal ... more of a PITA to restore
specific files and/or re-install the OS.

Similarly, the chances of the power supply frying are probably in the same
ballpark as a drive going. I don't see too many folks investing in
redundant power supplies.

> Buy a pair of 320GB's, RAID'em, and sleep happily. For additional
> happieness, buy them from different suppliers (or make sure they come
> from different batches) so you you don't have grief with "all disks
> from this particular batch go bad at the same time" problems...

RAID won't protect you from machine-local disasters. I tend to lean toward
storage diversity to mitigate risk. A separate, external drive allows
electrical isolation, different brand drives insulate you from broader
problems like the IBM old "Deathstar". If I'm going to invest in a second
drive, I'd do it external. If I'm really paraniod and need reliability, I'd
probably lean toward RAID in the desktop plus external, removable RAID (warm
backup) and DVD or tape cold backup.

Perhaps I'm just not used to drives failing that often. SMART drives (if
they're monitored) usually report symptoms in advance of total failure and
I generally buy drives with a good quality history.

The most common mode of data loss is probably PEBKAC
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebkac for the un-initiated). Good backups
are the best hedge against more risks if data integrity is a priority.
Received on Tue Aug 8 14:12:43 2006