Ian Forde wrote: > On Sat, 2009-02-21 at 17:24 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: >> Ian Forde wrote: >>> Might not be a bad idea to see how they're able to use >>> mdadm to detect and autosync drives. I don't *ever* want to go through >>> something like: >>> >>> http://kev.coolcavemen.com/2008/07/heroic-journey-to-raid-5-data-recovery/ >>> >>> Not when a little planning can help me skip it... ;) >> If you are really concerned about data recovery and can chunk up your >> filesystem mount points so things fit on a single disk (usually not too >> hard with 1 or 1.5 TB drives available now) just use software raid1 >> since you can simply mount any single disk from it and access the files. >> It becomes much more difficult with other raid levels or multi-disk lvm. > > My point is that at home, I'd rather do network mounts to a fileserver > utilizing HW RAID. At work, I'd rather use HW RAID with hot-swap disks. > This way, there's are no hoops to go through. Time is a more important > resource to me... SW RAID is a path that I went down well over a decade > ago in Solaris (DiskSuite and Veritas VM), followed by Linux mdadm. If > you've ever had to do a Veritas encapsulated boot disk recovery, you'll > know why I'd rather never go down that road *ever again*... ;) Yes, but raid1 in software has none of those problems, since as far as the boot loader is concerned, you are booting from a single drive. And there is a trade-off in complexity, since sw raid works the same on Linux across different hardware and you need to round up different vendors instructions and utilities for hardware raid - and have a backup controller around for recovery. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com