SOFTWARE-RAID-TIPS (was: Adaptec 7890 and RAID portIII RAID controller Linux Support)

[Osma Ahvenlampi]

"There can be only one." <bleh at bellsouth.net> writes:
> 	I also do it to aid in backups ... So since /, /home, /usr,
> /windows (a partition I use samba to serve to windows machines), and

It's true that separate partitions help when you're using dump/restore 
for backups, but unfortunately dump/restore are a problematic pair for 
backups (especially on Linux). I'd have to recommend Arkeia
(www.arkeia.com) for backup purposes. It's not terribly cheap, but I
find it's worth the money.

> /tmp are all on seperate partitions, it's really easy to store each to
> a seperate tape and to exclude /tmp altogether ...  That, and I've been
> told it's safer since if a section of your hard drive goes bad, it's
> less likely to effect all your partitions, but rather only the partition
> that has the bad sectors.  Is there any truth to that?  I remember on an

No, this isn't really a valid argument. Modern drives don't "go bad"
in one point, they automatically allocate spare blocks if they detect
errors, and at the point where you can actually see bad sectors in
software, the drive is past its life (and you're lucky if you can
restore data off it before switching).

In any case, we're talking RAID, so a failed disk is only an
administrative incident, not a catastrophy. Just swap it with a good
drive and let the system recover itself to full working order.

-- 
Osma Ahvenlampi



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