Re: The Small Company's Guide to Hard Drive Failure and Linux

["Anthony.zboralski" <bcs2005 () bellua com>]

> Frank Berger said:
>
> > using RAID-1 is most of the times also okay as a software RAID
> > configuration. Normally you do not see much more CPU load doing RAID 1
> > as software...
>
> CPU overhead has never really been the argument against software 
> RAID-1.
> Even with RAID-5, where it matters more, it's a forced argument at 
> best.
> The advantage of RAID-1 in hardware is that you are reducing the 
> traffic
> on the bus. In a two-disk hardware RAID-1, you send a single packet
> (block) of data across your system buss and the controller replicates 
> that
> block out to the disks. With software RAID-1, you have two blocks 
> flying
> across the bus for every write. Maybe system bus saturation isn't
> important to you and so then the point is moot.
>
> As was pointed out earlier (but perhaps not with enough forcefulness)
> nearly all hardware RAID controllers for ATA (IDE) are a lie. Unless 
> you
> are buying something high quality, what you are really getting is 
> firmware
> RAID-- software RAID on a chip. Who do you trust more to write a better
> implementation of RAID? Neil Brown, who benefits from peer review, or 
> some
> anonymous software engineer at a motherboard manufacturer? In addition 
> to
> this, there is the tendency by these same vendors (many of whom provide
> integrated motherboard support) to provide very badly written drivers 
> that
> hook into the SCSI layer-- making your array crawl.
>
> On the other hand, SW RAID-1 is fast on Linux and if one side of your
> mirror dies, you can bring up the remaining disks as a standalone 
> device
> (sans RAID)-- just mount the partitions normally. Presumably you aren't
> worried about system bus saturation in this case, which I suspect 
> 99/100
> people are not.
>
> Shameless plug (though it's getting a bit outdated):
> http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mraidlinux/index.html
>
> Also let me second the endorsement of Pilosoft. They have been very
> helpful through several power supply failures.

Make sure you stay away from "hardware RAID" as most of the 
implementations
don't even support RAID5 and the performance is really poor 15 
meg/second again 100+ with software raid. Plus you're stuck with a 
vendor with poor support.

There is a benchmark somewhere on google, in which linux software raid 
clearly comes
really ahead of most implementations (*bsd, hardware, etc.)

I am using a 350gig Linux 2.6.9 Software RAID5 array (4x120gig + 1 
spare) and I am
really happy with it .  The setup was done using IBM's volume manager, 
EVMS,
http://evms.sourceforge.net . it has really nice interface and 
documentation.

root@dis:/home/acz# hdparm -t /dev/md0

/dev/md0:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  168 MB in  3.01 seconds =  55.79 MB/sec
root@dis:/home/acz# hdparm -T /dev/md0

/dev/md0:
 Timing cached reads:   1176 MB in  2.00 seconds = 586.62 MB/sec

CPU usage is really minimal on this machine (1.8ghz AMD 2500+, 1gig of 
DDR ram),
the only time CPU usage climbs up is after a crash (my UPS died on my
a few times without warning while the power was up; I guess it is time 
to replace it; it's
kind of stupid that my UPS is a single point of failure, anyone know an 
easy way to run 2 in parallel.)

RAID5 or RAID6 is really the best way to go in terms of security and 
performance. RAID5
allows 1 drive failure (and will rebuilt its state automatically if you 
have a spare) and RAID6 allows 2 drives to fail at the same time. Using 
other raid modes for anything is pure waste unless you work with  big 
temporary files, for which the performance boost of a stripping array 
will come handy; 1 disk failure on a stripping array and you can say 
bye to your data.

Oh and btw even though you use RAID5/6 you are not protected from 
filesystem
corruption and human stupidity; you still need to do backup regularly.

Anthony

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