Re: file systems

Dave Hall writes:
> 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.

I guess I consider a couple of my home boxes to be in the "high
availability" realm... If I'm home, and power is on, I expect to
be able to use them... :)
 
> 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.

Am I the only one who has "new, spare power supplies" sitting in my
basement? :)

> > 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.

Absolutely. Just like hardware RAID becomes a royal pain when its
the RAID card that dies, and you can't find a replacement that is
backwards compatible with your drives!!

> 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.

Hmm... you have "RAID" and "backup" in there... :)
 
> 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.

Yup... and RAID helps you delay that trip to the harddrive
supermarket when a drive fails :)

Later...

Greg Oster
Received on Tue Aug 8 15:57:56 2006