Bart Trojanowski wrote:
* Milan Budimirovic <milan [ dot ] budimirovic [ at ] sympatico [ dot ] ca> [060529 18:50]:
Does anyone have any experience/recommendations?
Avoid RAID5. There are many issues with RAID5, search the web.
Try to get drives in your RAID set that come from different production
lines (if not from different production lines). Same production line...
same defect... multiple failures in the same block. RAID does not
protect from that.
Avoid Maxtor drives. I have a whole stack of dead 80G and 160G drives.
Maxtor is horrible for shipping back refurbished drives that fail again.
The worst experience I have had was with 18G Fujitsu SCSIs.
The Fujitsu IDEs manufactured at the same time were so bad that they
ended up dropping out of the market.
I have never used hardware RAID. I put more trust in the fact that I
have the source code for what generates the RAID superblock. You should
consider what will happen to your data if/when your RAID controller dies
and you cannot get a replacement.
I have had mixed experiences with software RAID5 failures. I have had
only good experiences with RAID1 & RAID10 failures -- as good as a
failure experience could be, anyways.
-Bart.
I am looking at going RAID 10 this time. I don't really need the read
performance or capacity you get from RAID 5.
That said, I have had mostly good experience with RAID 5, albeit with a
hardware SCSI controller. A lot has broken and I still managed to keep
my data and not suffer serious downtime. The worst thing was two years
ago when a bad power supply unit was causing perfectly good drives to
cut out one by one at random.
Thanks for the advice.