From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: John Robinson Subject: Re: Full use of varying drive sizes?---maybe a new raid mode is the answer? Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:23:04 +0100 Message-ID: <4ABBAAF8.5060407@anonymous.org.uk> References: <228790.21625.qm@web51307.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <4ABA8506.3080800@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <4ABA8506.3080800@gmail.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Konstantinos Skarlatos Cc: Linux RAID List-Id: linux-raid.ids On 23/09/2009 21:28, Konstantinos Skarlatos wrote: > Instead of doing all those things, I have a suggestion to make: > > Something that is like RAID 4 without striping. > > There are already 3 programs doing that, Unraid, Flexraid and disparity, [...] > Disk A B C D E P > Block 1 1 1 1 1 1 > Block 2 2 2 2 > Block 3 3 3 > Block 4 4 This is exactly what I want for a particular application I was thinking of putting together. I want to offer my customers nightly backups over the 'net. That's easy enough, and well off the scope of this list. I was going to save the data onto a big RAID of big discs, but I was wondering what to do when the customer needs the data, because downloading the data would take way too long, and I'm not taking my server offline to take to their site. So I thought, hmm, run a disc for each customer, plus a parity drive in case anything goes phut. Then when the customer needs their data, I can yank their drive and go to their premises with their data in hand. Of course, another option would be to copy the data onto a spare drive, but even that takes a while if they're in a hurry. Might have known somebody would already have done it. Cheers, John.