Re: Software RAID on Linux

From: Jamie Hushower <hushower@alaska-geeks.com>
Date: Mon Jun 14 2004 - 15:40:30 AKDT

Thanks for the replies. I went ahead and did my own testing. The results
   of a "regular" RAID 1 setup with no modifications or mirror scripts
are fair, not good. I am still reluctant to create a production server
without some tweaks.

If the drive on the second (IDE) bus fails, everything works fine. Shut
the computer down, replace the bad drive, reboot, and reconstruct the array.

If the drive on the first (IDE) bus dies, there are a few problems. The
server continues with no errors, but in order to replace the drive it is
necessary to power down the computer. The issue comes in booting; it
won't happen without some semi-serious changes to the boot scripts
(grub, fstab, mtab, etc.) on the surviving drive. This is more trouble
than I want.

Conclusion: This method would work fine if I had hot-swap drives and did
not need to reboot the server. However, if I had hot-swap drives I'd
likely have SCSI. If I purchase a SCSI card, I might as well spend the
few extra dollars for hardware RAID. I will look closely at the
responses to my initial posting and see if I can find an easy fix. It
might be as easy as spending a bit more time to understand GRUB.

-Jamie

Jamie Hushower wrote:
> Several years ago I wanted to use software RAID to creat a mirrored disk
> (RAID 1), but the Redhat setup would only allow partitions to be
> duplicated. Further, the boot partition could not be mirrored. As / was
> my boot partition, my setup was still susceptible to the failure of a
> single drive. I could, and did, mirror my /home partition to preserve my
> data in case of a failure. I am re-examining software RAID today because
> a bottom-of-the-line Dell server has *waaay* more juice than I need to
> run a mail and Web server. Can I use software RAID to create an exact
> duplicate of a drive- a true mirror?
>
> -Jamie

-- 
Jamie Hushower
Computer Consultant
Rent-A-Geek
223-9136
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Received on Mon Jun 14 15:33:24 2004

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