Re: RAID5 - 2nd drive died whilst waiting for RMA

[Brad Campbell <brad@wasp.net.au>]

Måns Rullgård wrote:
> David Greaves <david@dgreaves.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>I've been tracking this on the ide list and I've been nervous of
>>applying anything since I don't have proper  backups. I'm relying on
>>redundancy.
> 
>
> RAID can *never* replace proper backups.  RAID only protects against
> low-level disk failures.  Filesystem corruption caused by bugs,
> accidental deleting of files, etc. are happily allowed.  Get a DVD
> burner, you'll thank yourself one day.
> 

Heh. I have 2.5TB here. Thats a lot of DVD's.
I have the whole lot set chmod a-w and rely on RAID to keep me alive. (Having said it is a home 
entertainment system and would not cause mega dollar industrial damage if I lost it). All my 
original media is about 9,000km away but I could survive until I re-ripped it.

I slide my array drives out and slide in some throwaway spares to beat on for testing before I 
deploy a new kernel.

David Greaves wrote:

> 
> I looked to see what I'd need to do and given I'm running 2.6.9 I take it I'd have to apply:
>  
> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jgarzik/libata/2.6.9-libata1-dev1.patch.bz2
> which depends on
>  
> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jgarzik/libata/2.6.9-libata1.patch.bz2
> 
> That seems like quite a lot and I'm not clear on the level of stability impact on my system.
> 
> Now although I track linux-ide I doubt I'm fully informed!!
> So if anyone would like to inform me of a reasonable course of action then I'm actually reasonably happy to apply the SMART patch.

That is pretty close. I actually just cloned the kernel bk tree and pulled both of Jeffs trees, but 
then I ran about 10 hours of super intensive tests with 5 spare drives spread across my 3 
controllers before I slid my 13 raid disks back in and let it loose. I guess my real kernel version 
is somewhere around 2.6.10-rc1-bk3.

Have had good luck with it over the last couple of weeks and I have been hitting it pretty hard. 
But, as I said before, I'm on a UP machine. Andy pointed out some possible issues on SMP so beware 
there.

Brad
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