[OT] Useable BIOS RAID 1 on the cheap?

[David Cantrell]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 10:34:14PM +0000, Chris Benson wrote:

> <aside>Am I alone in rating data security above speed? I'm RAID1-ing
> home servers. Most of the servers at work are RAID1 for o/s and RAID0+1
> (or is that 1+0?) or RAID[45] with a remote mirror ...

No, you're not, but I fear we are a very small minority.

Of the 5TB (ish) of disks I have here, two are for data, two are for
backup, and one is spare.  I'm not using RAID, just daily rsnapshots,
but that's good enough for me given that the data doesn't change very
often, just gets added to.

I use 1TB external firewire disks (which internally use 4 250GB disks,
striped with no redundancy) because they're cheap.  The one spare means
that when a disk fails, I can still keep going, with backups, until I
replace it.  And I need to have *three* failures to lose data.  So after
two failures (and I've not even had one yet) I'll just turn stuff off,
on the assumption that a disk that isn't spinning is less likely to
break.

The weak point in all this is that all four of the disks in use are
hanging off the same firewire controller, so it could conceivably shit
its pants and blow them all up.  Even then, I think it likely that it's
only the controller board in each disk box that would die, and I'd be
able to transplant the disks into another to rescue their data.

-- 
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

I hate baby seals.  They get asked to all the best clubs.