[CentOS] Re: SATA Raid 5 and losing a drive

Tue Apr 11 19:07:46 UTC 2006
Chris Mauritz <chrism at imntv.com>

Scott Silva wrote:
> Chris Mauritz spake the following on 4/11/2006 11:24 AM:
>   
>> Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>>     
>>> On Tue, 11 Apr 2006 at 7:07pm, Andy Green wrote
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Andy Green wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>> Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>>>>>> Did you try doing any I/O to the array?  In my limited experience
>>>>>> with software RAID, it won't notice a drive missing until it tries
>>>>>> to do something with said drive.
>>>>>>             
>>>>> Yes I did do this, I copied a file to the mountpoint and did a sync.
>>>>> Nothing.
>>>>>           
>>>> Hm Googling around suggests that everyone with SATA raid may be
>>>> experiencing the same lack of warning that their safety net just blew
>>>> a hole through the server farm roof in a bid to reach escape velocity.
>>>>         
>>> And *that's* why I use 3ware...
>>>       
>> Same here.  Though I did use software RAID5 for a number of years back
>> in the 96-2000 timeframe and never lost any data, even on very busy
>> production mail servers.  But as I look back, I think I was just
>> remarkably lucky.  8-)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>     
> If it was on PATA hardware, the error code is pretty much refined. But libata
> is not anywhere near this level of maturity.
>   

It was a combination of PATA disks and other machines with piles of 9gig 
and 18gig SCSI barracudas.

Cheers,