Re: Spares and partitioning huge disks

[Frank van Maarseveen <frankvm@frankvm.com>]

On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 04:57:35PM -0500, Guy wrote:
> His plan is to split the disks into 6 partitions.
> Each of his six RAID5 arrays will only use 1 partition of each physical
> disk.
> If he were to lose a disk, all 6 RAID5 arrays would only see 1 failed disk.
> If he gets 2 read errors, on different disks, at the same time, he has a 1/6
> chance they would be in the same array (which would be bad).
> His plan is to combine the 6 arrays with LVM or a linear array.

Intriguing setup. Do you think this actually improves the reliability
with respect to disk failure compared to creating just one large RAID5
array?

For one second I thought it's a clever trick but gut feeling tells
me the odds of losing the entire array won't change (simplified --
because the increased complexity creates room for additional errors).

-- 
Frank