On Sat, 2010-12-25 at 08:47 -0500, Ryan Wagoner wrote:
On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 2:15 AM, Benjamin Smith lists@benjamindsmith.com wrote:
IMHO, very few people really need RAID. In many (most?) cases, the added complexity of RAID is as likely to cause an increase of failure rate similar to or greater than the reduction of failure rate caused by the resiliancy of hardware. RAID won't protect you if you issue a perfectly legitimate command to delete data that was made in error. I once thought I needed RAID, and since realized the error in my ways, finding that the cases where RAID helped (one!) was vastly outnumbered by the cases where it made no difference (10? 11?) or actually worked against me. (2) Now, I don't bother with RAID even though my needs have grown from one server to 16, instead providing redundancy at the machine level: if a server goes, another picks up the load, in most cases automatically, in near-real-time. I can do this because I host a custom-made application with these objectives carefully designed for.
I'm not sure why you have so many problems with RAID.
+1
I will never run a production server without RAID. A simple mirror (RAID 1) potentially increases up time and doesn't add much complexity.
+1 And a lowly technician can do it while I'm on vacation.
time. Failing over to another server is always great, but why be one server down for a simple drive failure.
Depending on the application failing to another server is also fraught with issues.
Not to mention the speed increases from RAID 5 or 10.
Speed increase from RAID 10 yes, not RAID 5. http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/BAARF2.html