From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Frank van Maarseveen Subject: Re: Spares and partitioning huge disks Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 15:52:28 +0100 Message-ID: <20050108145228.GB26475@janus> References: <200501072157.j07Lvg906301@www.watkins-home.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <200501072157.j07Lvg906301@www.watkins-home.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Guy Cc: 'Mario Holbe' , linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids 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