[geeks] Commiserate with me ... this sucks.

[mrl]

On Thu, 2004-07-01 at 02:40, bitrot wrote:

> a) never trust your data to IDE DISKS (unless you have hardware raid and 
> autohotswap)

Honestly, I don't have the money for 0.25GB of disks in SCSI (and before
I lost the array, that needed to be expanded by at least 150GB). 

Although, this next time I think the most important stuff will be on a
smaller SCSI RAID1 array attached to my Ultra 2. Then I don't have to
sweat about having the less important stuff on an array that isn't
backed up as often. 

> b) never trust your data to software raid (ew)

I hear from both directions on this. Some people are absolutely against
software RAID, while others say its faster and more reliable (when set
up properly, obviously) than hardware RAID. I have a 3ware hardware RAID
controller, but I wasn't using it for RAID5 because reportedly it was
slow enough that it wasn't worth it (the 6xxx series didn't use XOR or
something... I don't remember). 

I was using it in this case, honestly, because it was cheaper :). Just
for the record, though, what hardware RAID controllers do you use, and
how much have you paid for them? 

On Thu, 2004-07-01 at 02:16, Dan Duncan wrote: 
> On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, mrl wrote:
> > This is why they tell you to do backups even though you have RAID.
> > <sigh>... if only I had the money. (Although this next time, I guess I'll
> > be trying harder. Meh.)
> 
> Ouch!  Sorry to hear about your loss.  When you rebuild your RAID5
> set, consider a hot spare to prevent this happening again.

Yeah, I plan to, although what I really needed was double-check to make sure 
that error reporting worked. That was why I didn't see the first disk fail :(
I also plan to have my *most* important stuff on a much smaller RAID1 array.