From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Tomasz Chmielewski Subject: Re: Booting off of RAID10 versus RAID1 Date: Thu, 08 May 2008 19:38:22 +0200 Message-ID: <48233A8E.4000400@wpkg.org> References: <06c201c8b128$1c4bf045$5209f40a@exchange.rackspace.com> <1f0f1a960805081016k3aebfdecj3450f3edb1470a43@mail.gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <1f0f1a960805081016k3aebfdecj3450f3edb1470a43@mail.gmail.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Twigathy Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Twigathy schrieb: > My desktop NFS boots off my fileserver, with a local /boot partition > on a 2GB CompactFlash card in an IDE -> CF adapter bought for pennies > on fleabay. With a partition like /boot that doesn't get written to > very often (Only on kernel updates and initrd changes) I don't see the > write limitations as being too much of a problem. Not sure how well > they would fare in a raid1 setup, but again they'd only be written to > occasionally. For my SAN servers, I usually have a system installed on a IDE-flash or a USB-stick; data is stored separately on hard disks. This way, an operating system is independent of data - in case of any operating system failure, just replace a small flash module, and you have access to data again. Having an operating system together with data on any RAID makes recovery from failures much harder. Of course, everything depends on your usage. So far, I had only one problem with worn out flash: I placed RAID bitmap on flash, and some time later, I had I/O errors when trying to access the bitmap file. Probably Transcend IDE-flash disks don't do a very clever wear-levelling. Other than that, I don't have any problems - although some of these systems run off flash for several years now (including /var/log/). See also a recent "Compact Flash Question" discussion on lkml. -- Tomasz Chmielewski http://wpkg.org