Re: Care and feeding of RAID?

[Steve Cousins <steve.cousins@maine.edu>]

Gordon Henderson wrote:

>On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, Paul Waldo wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>I have a RAID6 array and I wondering about care and feeding instructions :-)
>>
>>Here is what I currently do:
>>    - daily incremental and weekly full backups to a separate machine
>>    - run smartd tests (short once a day, long once a week)
>>    - check the raid for bad blocks every week
>>
>>What else can I do make sure the array keeps humming?  Thanks in advance!
>>    
>>
>
>Stop fiddling with it :)
>
>I run similar stuff, but don't forget running mdadm in daemon mode to send
>you an email should a drive fail. I also check each device individually,
>rather than the array although I don't know the value of doing this over
>the SMART tests on modern drives though...
>  
>

Would people be willing to list their setup? Including such things as 
mdadm.conf file, crontab -l, plus scripts that they use to check the 
smart data and the array, mdadm daemon parameters and anything else that 
is relevant to checking and maintaining an array? 

I'm running the mdmonitor script at startup and a sample mdadm.conf  
(one of 3 machines) looks like:

MAILADDR cousins@limpet-gb.umeoce.maine.edu
ARRAY /dev/md0 level=raid5 num-devices=3 
UUID=39d07542:f3c97e69:fbb63d9d:64a052d3 
devices=/dev/sdb1,/dev/sdc1,/dev/sdd1

These are SATA drives and except for the one machine that has a 3Ware 
8506 card in it I haven't been able to get SMART programs to do anything 
with these drives.  How do others deal with this? 

Thanks,

Steve