Re: Port Multiplier access with Sil 3124

[Linda Walsh <lkml@tlinx.org>]

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Greg Freemyer wrote:
> 
>> I'm hearing of people saying a 2 disk mirror (raid-1) is not safe
>> enough.  Go with either a 3 disk mirror or to raid-6.  Even with
>> raid-6 I personally would not let it have too many spindles. (Whatever
>> too many means?)
> 
> IMO, RAID-1 was never safe.  With RAID-1, one must rely solely on 
> "knowing" which RAID component is bad.  With a completely dead drive, 
> this is obvious; with slowly creeping bad sectors, far less obvious.
---
	I had a similar thought -- how would I know if the
2-disks are actually "in sync"?

	I'm  guessing I could physically remove each and try to access
them as single-drives and they should be the same, but I don't know that
the RAID-1 format will store the data on each drive to exactly look
like a single mounted disk.  I can't think of how else they might
do it, or why, but I just haven't physically verified that I an
pull either HD and access it as a solo-hard disk.  (I'd hope so...but
until I've actually tried it with the hardware in question...)

	But all of this is really depressing me.  Just throw up my hands
and give up on computer storage?

	That hardly seems right.

	FYI -- my drive failures, recently, have kill my *backup*
hard disks.  All of my failures have been on my "newer", larger
hard disks that I use for backup purposes.

	I also had a triple Seagate drive failure within 2 months,
two of them within a week -- and I did lose *backups* of my primary
drives!

	That's just bas-ackwards.  My "plan" was to go to RAID-1
for my ****backup**** hard disks.  Most of my primary hard disks are
SCSI or SAS and they've been unaffected by the SATA pathos.