Re: file systems

Greg Oster wrote:
> 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... :)

I agree. This is also why I consider a large UPS essential and required
:) Last Friday's power outage was not very traumatic, except to my
spare machine (which only torrents in the background).

>>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? :)

No, and I'm probably not the only person on this list who buys ATX 2.0
compliant power supplies/supplies that have been tested. I've only ever
had cheap, included power supplies fail on me, and they've only ever
been in spare machines that aren't my main desktop/server.

It's often cheaper to have a spare mobo, power supply, and RAM than it
is to buy even 1 machine a redundant power supply!

> 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!!

The nice thing about Linux's software RAID is that you can change the
file system type to match the file system you formatted the RAID with
(at least on RAID1), and read the file system fine. With RAID5, this is
not possible due to the striping of the data.

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

Just don't delay too long. I decided it'd be better to buy a new system
than buy a new 40gb drive to replace the dead one in a RAID5, and then
one of the other drives didn't want to spin back up once I had moved
them over to copy the data off of it (granted, this was about a year of
operation between when the original failed and when I did this, but the
data wasn't very important -- just old MP3s).
Received on Tue Aug 8 16:43:35 2006