Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote: > On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 11:14:18AM -0700, Benjamin Franz wrote: >> Robert Heller wrote: >>> I suspect that this is a simular case to what I did: I have a server >>> with 4 drives. I have several (small) RAID1 partitions (/boot, /, >>> /usr, /var, etc.) with 4 mirrors and one large RAID5 with three >>> partitions and a hot spare (a LVM volumn group, containing /home and >>> some other partitions). I would guess that the admin with the "8-way >>> RAID1 for the OS" probably also has a 6 or 8 disk RAID5 or RAID6 for >>> the bulk of the disks >> Yup. 8 way RAID1 for the OS, 8 way RAID6 for the data. I was hoping when >> I setup the 8-way RAID1 for the OS that I would get really good read >> speeds since md is supposed to stripe reads from RAID1, but in practice >> the RAID6 completely kills it for read performance (~61 MB/sec from the >> RAID1 partition vs ~200 MB/sec from the RAID6 partition). >> >> In a deeply ironic turn of events, one of the hard drives in that >> machine died in a way that freaked the hardware controller driver out >> and caused a kernel panic last week. >> > > I've also seen CentOS 5.3 (or 5.4, not sure) crash when a single sata hdd failed. > The system was running mdadm RAID-1 mirror, so it shouldn't have been fatal event.. > > There was kernel oops on the console. too bad I didn't have time to capture it then. > System was running AHCI SATA on Intel ICH9 controller, with mdadm software raid. > > So there's still need for hardware RAID controllers.. A hardware controller can fail in ways that kill the kernel too. -- Les Mikesesll lesmikesell at gmail.com